It was in the autumn after my first trip to California that awkward adjustments first became a specialty for me. Routines I’d enthusiastically thrown away now had be reestablished.

Going back to high school and the familiar jog of classes, for one, felt like being the only adult in a world full of children. My classmates concerns–popularity, dating, grades, college, etc.–were not mine, nor were my ruffled considerations theirs. I was probably a little too addicted to the kick of rebellion by the time I turned seventeen, but now, I was also learning that, for every wave of adventure, a backwash must swell. Experience ends; points of view change. I had to learn to live with what comes next.

So, how did I get here. The trail I took the last six months had been so rambling, I sometimes had to sit back myself to put it together.

One long night the previous winter, I’d found myself stuck out on the streets, so tired and cold I decided I had no choice but to make my way back to the one door I knew I’d never find locked.

After weeks away, I snuck inside and huddled for warmth in the dark on my family’s living room couch. The familiar stiffness of a front door cut from too green wood, the general creakiness of a building perpetually settling on its foundation, caused it to seem like a stranger’s space where I was somehow familiar with the surroundings. Dad had turned the thermostat down to almost nothing before going to bed, for economy, as he always had, and even after an hour or more inside, I was still shivering, although out of danger. I’d never slept on a couch overnight before.

I rested there, listening to the sounds of the house from a different perspective, the rattles from loose objects, the not quite identifiable shuffling of four people asleep, the muffled intrusions leaking in from outdoors. On the coffee table just in front of my knees, I could make out the outline of yesterday evening’s newspaper where it’d been discarded in sections. As a kid, I’d distributed newspapers all over our rural neighborhood after school. I read it every day, too, sports first, comics second, international news last. Now, it seemed to be incomprehensible information about someone else’s planet. The strangeness of being here combined with the bulkiness of my winter coat prevented any deep sleep. I cruised the surface, not quite in, but not a long slip away either.

The erratic details of my life of the moment kept knocking around in my head in a familiar search for resolution. After another confrontation with my father, who seemed to harbor a special distaste for me that was unlike any he had for my brothers, I’d proved my independence by walking out one evening and not coming back. Then, determined never to return, I’d found space with the family of a friend where they accepted giving me shelter as the only alternative to my sleeping on the streets in the dead of winter. I was not returning to Dad, that was for certain. I even took a job for a few days, making milk shakes and fries at a drive-in, before getting canned for a combination of incompetence and unauthorized snacking. Now, after a few weeks, the generosity of my friend’s family was becoming almost as thin as the excitement of having run away to nothing. Without school, I knocked around all day, killing time. After dinner, there was only television. I was neither reading nor writing. I was sixteen years old with nothing but girls and independence to grab my attention.

“The future’s a fucking farce,” I told my friend Denny, whose family I was temporarily living with, explaining my dilemma. “What’s out there that’s supposed to be so fucking interesting? College? Bullshit. Then, what?”Denny and I were hanging out in his family’s small barn. The wood frame building provided shelter for two horses, both of which were now in their respective stalls, chewing absently after having had their feed. Denny had a similar slant on things.

“As soon as I can, when I’m seventeen,” he asserted, “I’m going to sign up for the army or the navy and get the fuck out of here. They’ll take you, if your parents sign. Mine will because they think the military will keep you out of trouble and make you grow up. I fuckin’ hope not!”

He smiled. We both took pride in seeming juvenile delinquents.

“My father’d sign too, if we were speaking,” I agreed, “just to get me out of his life. That’s how my brother escaped. Vroom! Outa’ here! He comes home on leave talking about all the ports in Europe and Asia where he’s been onshore. Imagine getting the fuck away from here!”

Before arriving at the magical number, seventeen, however, I had to maneuver my way through four more months. At a minimum, I had to eat and sleep. Somewhere.

At the usual ungodly hour, before the middle of the night had given up its definition, my father’s alarm clock ripped the silence, and moments later, flipping on lights, he thudded past me on his race to the toilet. His brain not yet ignited by caffeine and tobacco, Dad never looked over his shoulder to see me. I’d shrunk a little into the darkness, uncertain how welcome I’d be without witnesses. In a black mood, he might as easily throw me out with a snarl as welcome me back in silence.

I sat up in bleary indecision for a moment, weighing uninspiring options. Then, before the flush of water announced his return, I reluctantly gathered my scattered self together and, still shivering, scrambled out into the liquid cold. I closed the front door as quietly as possible behind me. It made me laugh a little when I imagined Dad sitting on the toilet and wondering who was breaking into the house while he was immobile. It hadn’t been in my thoughts to invite a confrontation, only to feel less frozen, and now, even half-awake, it was the easiest thing to step aside.

The country road I’d grown up walking and crossing was silent and still. A slash of dawn barely scarred the eastern hilltops. Gritty snow clogged the gutters, and the trees were hopelessly leafless against a star-splashed sky. Spring wasn’t coming for a long time. For me, this was home but not home, all at once. I’d never discard it, the frigidly beautiful edge of dawn, the familiar houses, the neighbors I knew must be sleeping nearby, but I’d also never belong here in the same way again. My connections frayed, they’d soon snap apart forever.

“It is fucking cold out here,” I said to some invisible companion. “Whew!”

Then, I shook myself to get the blood circulating in my limbs. The awkward couch time had stiffened my muscles.

Like some kind of uncommitted ghost, I walked on down the unlighted road past houses where I knew all the family names and lights were starting to come up. For a couple of years, after inheriting a route from my brothers, I’d delivered newspapers, door to door, after school, going around on Saturday mornings to collect on the subscriptions. I knew whose doors were open and when everyone came home. I also knew who was barely able or unwilling to pay. After a mile, my road ended at a divided highway where my brothers and I, years before, stood in awe watching crews and their machinery clear and cut the bed. Men in grimy, sweat-saturated, short-sleeved shirts and heavy boots laid it parallel to a soon to be marginalized two-lane that had connected old farms, country homes and settlements for decades. My memory of the work crews carving a road out the bare earth, pouring paving materials, remained vivid, cataloged as one of the dramatic transformations of the Fifties, linking rural America and powering a nation. Now, the busy, divided highway was lined with small businesses catering to travelers and truckers, all of their parking lots now lit up in a succession of pools against the stubborn night.

I found an empty seat on a stool at a truck stop and spent my last money on two slices of toast and a deliciously hot, invigorating mug of coffee. By what seemed like decades, at sixteen, I was the youngest, least seasoned veteran in the restaurant, but no one asked the obvious questions or seemed inclined to. In this place, in the still barely disturbed winter night, in a remote nook in the world, the unhooked citizens were likely to leave you alone. The dry heat felt like heaven. Relaxed finally, able to edge more easily back into the accommodating corners in my own skull, I sat there sipping from the mug an intensely frowning waitress kept filling and got comfortably back into the feeling that I could be anyone and go anywhere. Anything could happen at any time.

​All I had to do was start walking, hitchhiking, bumming accommodations, finding girls, believing, taking on whatever circumstances I found in my singular adventure. I could easily become some modified kind of tramp, I thought. It was all there, although that vague, but exhilarating “it” was not destined to get much clearer for some time and never completely. I understood it more than I knew it in any concrete way, but I did begin to see the raw outlines of some thing. Maybe “it” was just the hole left behind by what I no longer saw–the inevitability of events in the future. Whether I’d stepped or been shoved out the door, I was fully out and not now feeling much like I wanted to go back in. This was the fantastic borderline of childhood, and here I stood looking forward, cold, flat-broke, homeless, hungry, a little bit boggled, and determined. I felt good. This first full blush of freedom was the right, irrational place to begin. All the other jerk-offs my age were dragging their asses out of bed to go off to be bored in one more day at school, I thought, amusing myself. I’d be doing something different. I stayed on that stool for quite a while, watching the mixing point of the universe go back and forth, in no hurry to decide anything. There was no place I needed to be. Daylight came up and filled the windows, traffic enlivened the new highway, car after car pulling up to the pumps out front, and I was Bob Dylan at dawn, sitting alone on some riverbank, watching the river flow.

Six adventurous months had passed since that cold, clear morning, and I’d concluded that I was too jaded, too Dylan-inflected, to be swept up anymore by uninformed enthusiasms. That phase was gone. In this one, I wanted to know. Already, 1965 had been my longest year, month after month after month of fending for myself. After surrendering to enough weeks at home to avoid the cold and to wait for the Navy to accept me, I’d taken to the roads in the spring to find my mother and California and saw places and did things I’d only guessed about before, opening up a new way to see the world and how to handle it.

Actually, somewhere in 1965, I’d crossed over to the idea that I’d handle the world at all, rather than be handled by it.As July stretched out and summer began to seem endless, I’d still been in California and aware that it was glaringly obvious that my original premise in coming here had been completely swept aside. I never talked about joining the Navy anymore, leaving me without an excuse for continuing to hang around, doing nothing, a seventeen-year-old dropout with no plans. Mom, who’d already saddled her third husband with the five kids she’d introduced into the world during the tenure of his alcoholic predecessor and who’d bestowed on me the nickname, Automatic, because I was shiftless, started asking routinely about my intentions, as if she imagined I must have some. Her husband, Sam, was a good guy who already worked two jobs, and another child was not in the budget. That was the unspoken, but certain, set of facts I had to keep aware of.

“I wish I knew what I was going to do,” I confessed, aware I was being urged to go back to New York.

Mom and I had committed much of the last few weeks to the somewhat lost cause of getting to know each other again, and I’m sure having recaptured one of her initial brood lightened her. I was equally certain that conversations about my status were being conducted behind closed doors and that they’d heated up after I walked out on my military physical and, then, stayed on. Realistically, there was only one place where I still belonged. I’d burned a lot of bridges, but not all completely to the ground.

“So, you think dear old Dad would welcome you back with open arms?” Mom asked, her sarcasm less acid now toward the man she claimed had campaigned to destroy her.

I felt I should let her off the hook. I’d always loved her, and she had enough on her hands without me.

“I’m still a minor. He doesn’t have to like me, but he can’t just throw me out. He can’t.”

Mom laughed and shook her head. “Dear old Dad...” she sighed.

We were at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. We’d spent a lot of time on that, drinking coffee, gossiping.

“Do you think he’d send you any money, you know, to help you get home?”

“Only one way to find out. I’ll beg,” I said, and in that roundabout way, Mom and I acknowledged that our time out of time together was drawing to a close.

I’d never see her again with anything left of a child still in either of us, but I’d be permanently grateful I’d been able to do it now while she was still in her prime, raggedly gorgeous and full of optimism.

Almost immediately, Dad responded to a letter I wrote by mailing a bus ticket, firmly stamped “NON-REFUNDABLE” in red on the front, leaving the responsibility for traveling cash with Mom and Sam. In this way, they fired one more round at each other, me having placed myself squarely in the middle.

As soon as I could put my traveling gear back together, without seeming like I was rushing nor being pushed to the door, I got a ride from Sam to the bus station, Mom and my half-brothers and half-sisters jumbled in his station-wagon and yelling “Good-bye” and “Don’t forget us!” out the windows.

I climbed aboard and occupied the same seat on a Greyhound Scenicruiser for three days, finally transferring to a local in Buffalo, on my way back to Binghamton. I read J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories to pass the time and watched the country whiz effortlessly by. Drivers changed; other riders departed and joined. Briefly, in Nevada, I made friends with Australian newlyweds who had the seats across from me and were out to see America firsthand at ground level. We killed time during a stopover in Reno recklessly pulling the handles on one-armed bandits and even winning a little. I made no other friends, more accustomed than ever now to flying solo.

Back in New York, eight weeks lingered before I’d return to high school and chase the diploma I’d never learn to care much about. I slept late for the rest of the summer and, denied a tardy return to the baseball team where I’d once been a star, unobtrusively watched heat and sun enrich the hills and fields around me.

No one was ever more happily directionless. I parted ways with baseball’s dreamy green fields, rendering wasted all those days spent emulating and learning from Drysdale, Snider, Koufax and Stan Williams. I got involved for a while with Rosie, a pretty blonde Polish girl who lived in Johnson City. Rosie was tall, straight and lean and inclined to introversion, even to the point of sometimes seeming unreachable. We started out by taking long walks and holding hands on her hilly, neighborhood streets when I came by after dinner. The evening shadows extended and cooled around us. In this crepuscular time, the world pulled back. We talked and talked, mostly about the future and what we’d eventually make of it. Her outlook, once she began putting it into words, was far more conventional than mine (as was everyone else’s), and I suppose that was some of the attraction. She wanted a family of her own, preferably not far from where we stood, and I had some uncertain ideas about writing books and having no other commitments. Some girls really did dig a boy out on the edge, a rebel, a pusher into the future. I was far from an ordinary guy but, I was learning, drawn to people and situations where the doors everyone else seemed able to walk straight through might be open for me.

Eventually, as our evenings sunk into nights, I’d have Rosie pressed up against a brick wall in the backyard of a public school building, kissing her passionately with nowhere else realistically to go. There were many things to like about her, her gentle, soft-voiced presence, her long, thrilling strawberry blonde hair, so dense and rich when I ran my hands through it, her sweetly perfect face that induced boys and girls alike to take a breath when she walked into a room. With her eventual permission, we graduated to her parents’ living room couch, where we stretched out and repeatedly edged up to the precipice of sexual relations before falling back down the hill.

Rather, we were pushed back–by Rosie. Who could blame her, unless, of course, hormonal invaders were scrambling your brain cells? Her parents slept only twenty feet away or, at least, pretended to. Maybe they were wide awake, stretched out across their own established mattresses, remembering their days of high-geared fucking. I didn’t care. Twenty feet was twenty miles as far as I was concerned. Their house was most of the way up one of the North Side hills in Johnson City, the straight streets climbing over a rift valley that split the village in two, pinned against the topography by perfectly placed streetlights. This community had grown as immigrants settled in after obtaining jobs at Endicott–Johnson, IBM, General Electric and Public Works. Every family had members with close connections for remembering their flights from impoverished, war-torn Europe and the celebration of landing in America. The new arrivals helped redefine a modern country with a place in the world evolving as something more powerful than a beloved land of refuge. They produced beautiful, gentle daughters like Rosie who’d be the first in most families to attend college before starting careers likely to be aborted by marriage and who could be induced into turmoil by boys like me. It’s possible that she kept turning back my final advance because I never said I loved her, which was just honesty, or maybe, it was because she imagined her mother coming to the kitchen for water and seeing her daughter’s long, slender thighs turned deliciously outward or her embracing ankles crossed tightly against my bare ass. My common sense obliterated, I kept making high drama out of this push and pull, until finally, Rosie let me walk out the door after one more climactic, nearly wordless face-off. Out on the sidewalk by myself, separated by my own bad judgment from the middle class, the after midnight world was warm and still, shades drawn across all the windows, and I was returned to being a jackass. I imagined beautiful Rosie still sitting on the couch, jeans unzipped, turned to watch me leave, a perplexed look surfacing. Humidity held the after midnight heat in place. I’d overplayed my hand and lost the girl. I tucked myself in and started out again on the long, middle of the night trip home, walking down into the valley by Johnson Field and back up to Main Street where I could thumb for rides with other guys also returning from more or less successful dates. Rosie shot down every invitation to reengage I tossed her way, until I finally stopped trying, having successfully proved myself an idiot. It was the middle of the summer, and there still was nothing I wanted to do.

I sort of lapsed, then, into my surprising friendship with Joyce, which lasted until September after which both of us segued into new personas in new places with all new sets of faces.

Returning east from California, I’d rode into town after passing the Finger Lakes, those long, placid pools of water tucked under verdant farmland in Western New York, in the back of the Greyhound local, bleary from a three day, around the clock journey, but too excited by the sights of home–the rolling hills and rectangular farms, now effloresced in summer–to sleep, on a broad, bright afternoon. The foothills, rippling like distant, frozen waves generated by the Appalachians, rocky uplifts separating the continent from the sea, were almost balletic, rounded off by arctic glaciers, gliding up to meet a deep blue sky, puffy white clouds scudding under the surface.

Our bus stopped alongside the peaceful, shady square in every little town and hamlet. Residents sat on benches or strolled through uneven successions of sun and shade. Our driver left his seat to go out and lift the metal door on the side of the bus to take on or offload baggage, then forcefully slammed it down again before turning the latch. Outside, village life moved slowly, unruffled. Then, finally we rolled down the final stretch along the shallow, slow-rolling Chenango River as settlements grew thicker, buildings taller, and everything came together to make up my hometown. Binghamton spread out flat across an accommodating gap in the hills where the Chenango met the powerful Susquehanna, just now starting to climb more of the embracing hills as its population grew.

Alone, like a tramp, almost completely broke, I carried my belongings down the steps of the bus in a single bag, which I immediately stowed for safekeeping in a rental locker inside the terminal. Then, I walked out onto sunny Chenango Street to see my hometown with fresh eyes after the longest sixty days of my life. The dried out dustiness of July rose up from unpaved parking lots and was scattered by endless traffic. A few blocks up Chenango, I ran into Joyce, a girl I knew who had what we then called “a bad reputation.” It was one of the oddest coincidences of my life that she’d also been the last friend I saw when I left town. I’d talked her into skipping school to see me off and share a breakfast. Now, it was as if I’d been on a revolving platform. It took me through a door behind which hid California, Mom and the rest of the world. When it delivered me back, two months later, my home waited unchanged, simply slipping back into gear upon my arrival. Even a fantasized girlfriend idled in place while I turned.

“Hey, when did you get home?” Joyce smiled with surprise when she spotted me on the sidewalk in front of The Little Venice. “You said you were going away forever. What happened to the navy?”

“I just got home ten minutes ago,” I said, a little astonished to see her. I gestured behind me toward the station.
“I just got off a Greyhound. I was lucky. I got to ride all the way back. It was a lot easier than hitchhiking.”

“Well, did you get homesick or what?” she teased. “Oh, this is Hobbs.”

I never got to know Hobbs very well, but there might not have been much there to know. She always seemed sort of absent, an unassertive sidekick to contrast boisterous Joyce. If there was any real stuff to Hobbs, it went on far behind the placid mask she showed.

“How long were you riding the bus?” Joyce wanted to know.

“Wow, three days! I can’t believe I’m actually on the street.”

My legs were still getting used to supporting weight, and I hadn’t adjusted yet to Chenango Street’s seeming like a stage set. I wasn’t yet embedded, and the coincidence of meeting up with Joyce increased the unreality.

“Hey, do want to come with us?” Joyce asked.

“Depends on where you’re going?” I dodged, but only slightly.

I was eager for an unscheduled detour.

“We’re hanging out at Hobbs’s house. Her mother’s on a trip, and we have it all to ourselves for a few days.”

The one thing I’d been dreading, all the way across the country, was walking into my family’s house again and dealing with whoever happened to be there when I opened the always unlocked door. I took for granted that what I’d done, bugging out to go see Mom, had been taken as a betrayal toward our father. The prevailing opinion that he’d made heroic sacrifices in keeping us together had hardened in the decade after she was gone, a critical time during which we’d all become something more complicated than children. I didn’t see it as simply as that, good guy versus bad guy, black against white, especially now that I’d had time to dabble in being a momma’s boy again, but as the proven weakest member in the house, I didn’t want to argue against it either. There were battles I’d never win.

“Good idea, me hanging out with two girls,” I agreed, before embarking with them on a return trip down Route 11, the road along which I’d just come home by bus, to Hobbs’s place in Castle Creek.

Most girls, even loose girls, which Joyce and Hobbs most certainly were, refused to hitchhike. Instead we walked in the summer sun, listening to a transistor Hobbs brought along. We weren’t in any hurry.

Maybe Joyce had an intuition about what would happen between us in the coming weeks. I didn’t. I saw nothing of the road through intimacy and friendship to bitter, confusing separation. So far, I saw this only as a chance to extend my string of sexual conquests, escalating the count all the way up to two.

I’d seen and remembered miles upon miles of America, east to west, then west to east, bumming rides outbound from strangers, then sleeping and reading J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories on the smooth rolling Greyhound as it cut through the corn and the wheat fields and stockyards of the midsection like a travelers' rocket. I’d previously known places like Michigan, the Mississippi River and butte country only mythically, through pictures and school books that left them too fantastic to be real–but real, I now knew, they were.

It was no secret to me or anyone else that my life seemed to take the odder path, the one less traveled for completely practical reasons, but glancing back at a six month jumble, it could seem even odder. Crossing the astonishing prairies of Nebraska in the middle of one night, I woke up suddenly as the sour odor of gristmills soaked the bus and we swept through the darkest night with just the lights from isolated farms interrupting. When I reached Oakland, riding down out of the Sierras from Nevada, I'd wrapped my arms around my mother for the first time after a decade of absence. She and Sam, husband #3, stood grinning and relieved in their leather jackets, having come down from Richmond to meet each westbound bus, all afternoon, until I finally stepped off. Mom was younger, prettied and funkier than I expected, her baggy, Old South inflected telephone voice having betrayed her at a distance. One afternoon in the East Bay, just short of my seventeenth birthday, I’d been the lucky beneficiary of a gift from one of Mom's sweetly amoral friends, a generous redhead who swung open the sexual door I’d been pushing so feverishly against. In this amazing run of weeks, which proved forever what amazing things following your impulses can bring, the world grew smaller, the plane of time foreshortened. My intuitions about opportunity went vast. My experiences stretched me in a way that had me feeling I'd never pause or stop again. I was in no way eager to see the illusions end.

Returned after a couple of months from a trip intended, ostensibly, to start a new life Out West, signing up with the Navy, I knocked off a summer without goals. My recent adventure, locally unapproved and viewed now as something akin to jumping off into space and being dragged back by gravity, left me an outsider even in my own family, with no job and, generally, chasing girls or otherwise killing time until getting back into high school.

I'd always listened to hours of top forty music, but that summer I listened more. Even truncated, the innovative blend of rock and folk powering Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone changed AM radio forever. The Kinks and Stones turned the British Invasion more visceral, closer to the teenage bone. Popular music wasn’t just an adolescent soundtrack anymore. For once, I gained some of the insight from music, with its quick, pungent, literate tattoos, I'd always gotten from books. The critical, sarcastic, sometimes funny take on current themes reached me and made me feel less alone. Dylan’s lyrics especially had me feeling there were greater spirits on the road with and ahead of me.

As my dream of escaping to California moved closer to reality, I’d managed to avoid the routine monotony of high school as winter edged into spring because, after running away from home during the annual emotional turmoil of winter, I’d stayed out of classes long enough that resuming where I’d already been far behind was hopeless. And boring. They weren't teaching me much I wanted to learn, and, a middle child, I'd grown habituated to stubborn resistance whenever my inner guidance told me I was on solid ground, disregarding common sense. Public schooling amounted to container jamming, filling students up with facts, select, tainted facts positioned in strategic context, to be rattled back on demand. Being sculpted into a productive citizen felt to me like eating and shitting bad, superannuated ideas all day. It put me to sleep. Besides, since I was about to turn seventeen, I could quit with immunity, and my announcement that I’d be following my oldest and oddest brother into the Navy bought me a pass at home. Returning now, however, the luxury of a teenage summer infecting me, I knew wasn't ready for the long snooze of adulthood. Nothing about high school would become less boring by September, of course, but at seventeen, I saw little else I could reasonably do — except join the military and that idea, of course, had already collapsed in failure one gray morning at an induction center in Oakland.

Most of that summer, after striking out with Rosie, I ended up hanging out with Joyce, the girl with the bad reputation benevolent fate had put back in my path when I got off the bus from California, right where she’d been when I left. We lounged in hammocks in her back yard, drinking iced tea and coffee and sharing serious, rookie conversations about life, searching the broad, enticing future, surrounded by the intense green of August and feeling stimulated by so much we didn’t know and assumed the adults would never tell us. Joyce had graduated from high school, educationally as far as she ever intended to go, and was conflicted, faced with a decision of whether to stay behind or follow her mother on a planned family move to Saginaw. Her Mom wanted her stuff packed in the traveling van with theirs, but Joyce was an adult now, legally, and no one could force her to physically disconnect from all the friends and experiences she’d accumulated or from a hometown she considered vibrant enough to keep her happy. Joyce dreamed small, but intense.

“You know how I am,” she confided, shrugging with a sly, slightly frightened little smirk.

“I’ll just be wild if I stay here,” she surmised. “There won’t be anyone left to tie me down.”

This wasn’t the playful talk it may have sounded to an outsider, especially when spoken with that too wise little curl turning her lips up on one side. Joyce had demons–or, at least, what we then thought of as demons. Both of us were aware of them, and neither of us believed in our hearts that they were 100% bad in a practical way, maybe not in any way. But, they were more dangerous for girls and escorted her into some risky situations, ones in which neither of us had enough experience to identify the hazards or benefits.

The Sixties, although opening in a rough and rude kind of a way, had not yet exploded, and for the most part, the adults in conspiracy were still training us to be idiots. If we were going to discover anything, it had to happen in our own quirky labs. Joyce was more fearless than any girl I’d known, and this spicy sense of the times enlivened her.

We’d surprised ourselves by becoming close friends, even what you might call buddies, sharing intimate knowledge of each other and implicit communications.

“What the hell are we doing together, you and me?” I got used to saying, shaking my head in wonder. Joyce was a discovery.

“...unless someone wants to stick around and be my protector,” she added, half-joking, reaching.

This last comment introduced a door and, then, opened it wide for me to think about walking through. I’ll be honest. I seriously considered it, which should tell you everything you need to know about how shaky my judgment was at seventeen.

The challenge of our friendship, as we stood at a crossroads, was singular. We were roughly equals. I could tell her anything. She appreciated me in a discerning way no one else ever had. She got it, however nebulous my personal “it” remained. And, if she was a slut before the rest of the world, even fractionally true to her reputation, she never was to me. We’d held back from sexual contact. Crossing that ever-present line, like drawing a single impressive brush stroke, could change the tone and color of everything else between us and, maybe, not for the best. As we adjusted our views in each other’s eyes, trying to see one another as whole characters for the first time, we both abandoned whoever we always were and just became Joyce and Pete. We'd spent plenty of time holding hands and kissing and walking out in the dreamlike darkness of summer nights, and God only knows how much we talked, but we’d never laid down naked together. Sex, it seemed, without saying so, could derail this enticing mystery train of friendship. Strange to think, hormonally speaking, it didn't seem worth the gamble.

If I took her lead here, everything might change, including the future. The same could be true, if I didn’t, but I hadn’t gotten there yet.

“How would we live, Joyce?” I argued. “Neither one of us has ever had a full-time job…”Impatient, she interrupted me.

“We could find a cheap apartment. We could find jobs. We’re not stupid. I have friends who only pay…”

“Yeah, they pay something,” I reminded her firmly. “Rent always costs something, and our total income is zero." I emphasized with a circular hand gesture. "And, what about food? Clothing? All those annoying little extras?”

“You’re my friend, Pete,” Joyce answered sadly.

She knew where the conversation was going.

“You’re the nicest guy I know, the way you treat me–we could work it out.”

“Thanks. I like you too. I don’t want to lose you, ever, but…”

Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet learned that practicalities were meaningless little hodgepodges set up to restrict momentum. They were furniture, and they took care of themselves. I wasn’t going to learn it for a long, long time, for decades, until well after it was too late to help Joyce.Joyce held her face in her hands, hair scattered in uneven ribbons between slender fingers, and started to cry.

“I could find a job,” she insisted in a whisper, determined.

She was confident but aware that she’d never convince me.

“What are you so afraid of? Are you afraid of me?” she asked.

In fact, I was–afraid of her. Younger and less experienced, I sensed another Joyce idling inside who’d toss me away for another, more capable guy in a second. With people, I was beginning to see the shadows.

We'd paused, at this strategic point in our endless conversation, while carrying packed, corrugated boxes down a set of wooden stairs that led into their cool, dry basement. She'd simply dropped slowly onto the step behind her. Basements share light differently than anywhere else in a house. In the unusual silence, it seemed to run in like a cool fluid through the ground level windows. Her long slender legs, bare and tanned below raggedly cut off jeans, were tucked back and leaned sideways against mine. Summer was ending, and soon, she'd be forced to decide.

“I can’t, Joyce,” I answered with conviction, absolutely, spreading my fingers out in front of my knees in a gesture she didn't see. She was my friend, and there was going to be no beating around the bush. “Christ, man, I haven’t even finished high school. I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t even know what the hell I’m going to do with my life. You couldn’t count on me for help. I'm more erratic even than you are.”

Then, I added: “How well do we really know each other, Joyce–or even ourselves?”

How much had either of us seen of the other’s shadows or even our own?

Generously silent in the back of my thoughts, was the knowledge that, when things got dull, as they inevitably would, I’d probably be unable to count on her either. We both understood the potential for her turning native, “going wild,” as she called the spontaneous succession of antics she sometimes launched. She hadn’t earned her reputation, after all, sitting home knitting scarves. The first night we met, she’d stood joyfully in the middle of the front seat of Sam Kitchen’s speeding convertible, her feet braced under his and my thighs where we sat below her. Sam, clearly expecting to fuck her before the night was out, reveled in her wildness. A hot wind whipped her hair back and pressed the thin fabric of her black blouse firmly against her small breasts. Laughing, she finally sat down between us as Sam pulled up in front of my house. She jumped out, gave me a long deep kiss, declared, “I really like you! You’re cute,” then jumped back in beside Sam. I could hear her laughing as I stood at the top of my driveway and watched them speed off into the privacy of the night and, in effect, almost as clearly now as we sat on her basement steps, my arm around her shoulders, perched though she was on a completely different physical outcropping in her visceral world.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed her mother, a nice lady who sincerely wanted to help and who, I believe, had no idea what a maniac her daughter could be, watching silently from the top of the stairs.

“What do you want me to do?” Joyce sobbed, in the undertones an accusation. “Do you think I should go to Michigan, too?”

Turning the question to what I wanted put us in a whole new place. She seemed to have ceded the most crucial decision in her life. It startled me. I’d sure as hell never been there before.

“Really, what else are you going to do?”

I wasn't backing down. I generally didn’t melt for tears, even then.

“Come back to Binghamton, if it's awful. Neither one of us is ready for anything else. Honestly. We'll write, and if you feel like it, you can come back after a while, when you’ve saved some money and things are more settled.”

“What ‘things?’” she hissed back at my evasive cliché.

I didn't love Joyce, not in any magical way, which was how we all still believed it to be. Neither of us had said the words. Strange, then, to find ourselves even obliquely considering a place together, shacking up, as a solution to the uncertainties in one of our semi-adult lives. But, we were intrinsically linked in some other way for which neither of us had an expression. Both of us seemed to know it, and it was odd that, without a publicly recognized word, nothing tangible emerged. Sometimes, we joked that we were “in like” for lack of anything else. Our link was strong and mysterious and intimate. There were quiet moments when I felt certain we had a chance to make something I couldn't put into words from it, something new and great and never before done. I sensed this without the burden of any logic. I just never saw how it fit in or grasped it well enough to get up the nerve to take any serious action. As the clock ran down that summer, I just sort of looked at our unusual friendship from every angle and marveled. The strange, new feeling impressed me. I was learning. Real insight remained incipient.

In perspective, looking back, this turning point–when Joyce finally got back on her feet and resumed folding her clothes, loading them into boxes for the truck to Michigan–stands out as far more critical than I then imagined, at a time when I had scant awareness of turning points. My acknowledged dramas were still more conventional. Sometimes, I look back on it as an early critical misstep in the creation of my life. Ultimately, then, I selected love over intimacy, romance over soulful commitment, sense over intuition. You think you’re making a choice for one day, for that sequence of events presently buffeting you on Earth, ready to get on with everything else, but any decision lasts forever and influences everything else for the same duration. It’s like that overworked image of a rock thrown into still water, the waves sprawling out into infinity, although seldom does reality sustain so much symmetry. You believe the effect diminishes. It doesn’t. It just grows broader. The world around you, no matter in which direction you travel, will always be changed and changing because of what you did. I hadn't learned yet how important it was not to underestimate anything. We'd finally just whipped Mariner 4 past Mars, but in the long run, my abandonment of this girl mattered more.

Abruptly, Joyce leaned forward, gathering a deep, quavering breath and, wiping the tears from her cheeks, ran the backs of her hands across her face, tucking her hair temporarily behind her ears in one, conclusive motion.

The back of her neck was very pretty with wisps of hair like silk exposed only at such unintended moments. She laughed a little to gather herself and vaporize the drama.

“Well, that settles it,” she concluded in a general way. It was both rhetorical and accusing.

She’d made a decision too. She’d decided to stop pushing where she had so little chance of getting up the constantly dissolving hill. She leaned forward and brought herself up straight, a little too erect at first, and continued into the basement to resume stacking.

I looked behind us. Her mother no longer waited silently at the top of the stairs. I can’t say I didn’t feel a little relieved. The remaining days until their departure whizzed by, faster than I wanted, like grain down a silo, accelerating once a direction took hold.

Enough commitment and interest carried over that, as Joyce settled into Saginaw, we wrote long letters to each other at least once a week–at least once a week for a while, anyway. She wrote interesting, jokey observations about life in a Great Lakes town and her successful adventures in job hunting. She quickly landed an office job and started going out in the crowds near the water on still mild weekend nights. She described a carnival on the lake, cruising the crowds, with color and detail:

“Everybody comes out to the lake on Friday, after work. It’s like the county fair, except it never shuts down. Some guy tried to impress me by winning a Teddy Bear. Can you imaginemewith a Teddy Bear? Nobody knows anything about me here. You can see that.“So, what’s going on back in old Binghamton? It miss it––you!Nobody to talk to here. I’ll be back some day. I hope everything always stays the same.”

Neither of us had ever lived in a waterfront city.

I told her about my somnambulistic return to high school and that it still felt so odd, that all I wanted to do was hang out in my room and write, write, write fiction and poetry.

It wasn’t long before our letters became weekly and the stack of pages fewer. The frequency with which she mentioned that she was coming back when she saved some money and got more confidence diminished. At first, her long letters detailed all the facts and incidents about finding her way in a new place, many of them funny, and mine reassured her that things back home hadn’t changed. There weren’t many interesting stories for me to tell. Never evolving, our disjointed correspondence spun off in other directions. In the immediacy of seventeen, four hundred miles seemed farther than the moon.

Although the lapse was mutual, I believe my letters tapered off in volume and intensity first. Plenty of times on downer days, especially Mondays, I eagerly opened the metal flap door on our roadside mailbox and got no reinforcing affection from her curly handwriting on an envelope. I learned that absence does not make my heart grow any fonder; it makes it frumpy.

​Once I fell in love with Ginny, I abruptly discontinued writing altogether and barely skimmed Joyce's letters when they did come, glancing over the contents as I walked down our driveway. I took only passing notice when she wrote: “What’s going on? Did you forget about me?” I never answered, coolly deciding indifference to be expression enough.

Before wrapping up, I'd be negligent if I didn't credit Roger K. Miller, a fellow writer and Binghamton, New York native, author of a terrific hometown memoir, The Chenango Kid. Serializing a novel, as writers did in periodicals in centuries past, was Roger's idea. I stole it and am grateful for his inspiration and not pointing out my egregious theft.

One last reminder: You can find all my competed books on my Amazon Author Page. The Witch Next Door with will joining the list in late September, after some fixing up, filling up literary potholes and polishing.

Thanks again to all of you whom I have been lucky to have as readers on this blog.

The Witch

It was always going to happen. All things end. There are no exceptions.My last conversation with Val happened almost fifteen years after the Saturday night when we met in a darkened corner at a dance in the gymnasium at the Binghamton Boys Club. Other than obligatory family connections that turn cold without breaking, no one else stayed in my life that long, but now we approached a terminus.I called her only every few months now, checking in, confirming our mutual outsider status, but I never drove or hopped on a bus to cover the short distance needed to see her. No enough switches clicked into the on position, our synergies intermittent.I quit trying to persuade her to come to Buffalo, even for a weekend. It was the one thing we never did, step outside everything else without an easy exit in sight. She balked.“If I do, you’ll never let me leave,” she challenged me.The claim was so unexpected, I didn’t know how to answer. She still drove the old van she asked me to help her check out on the morning I went back to Maggie. It symbolized my self-demolition. But I recovered. I did finally leave Maggie, and I was on my own. I was alone.Was it a challenge? Should I have grabbed the chance, called her out and demanded? No, I could hear her laugh, inspired by one more of my inflatable absolutes. Whatever I might have said to change her mind, I didn’t, and that’s history, now and forever.A year or so after my last invitation, I called on a Saturday evening when I had a half-hour or so to kill and found her home. My call felt less welcome than any had in a long time.Val was restless, stalled while cruising out of her twenties. She told me about some guy she’d met, a guy from Ithaca, and how tempted she was to follow that trail north to a new town and, maybe, another start. My door, always unlocked then, opened and Jodi walked in. We had plans to go see a movie. I raised my index finger to let her know I’d be just a minute. The conversation with Val had already gone on too long. Being dismissed should be brief and to the point. It was past time to admit that tramps on the move from the Sixties had no business trying to finagle their way into the Eighties. We were out of date. Jodi waited on the couch in my living room while Val and I wrapped up. From that day forward, I imagined that Val followed her impulse and settled in Ithaca, a college town where she fed her freethinking intellect and raised children. I wondered if we’d bump into each other again someday. If so, what would we say, if anything? We had nothing left, which I understood later on meant that fate was done with us. We were not going to mess up one more chorus in song.

When you leave so much behind, lucky to serious damage, maybe a bit crippled, a good person hopes the damages done are not more than can be accepted and atoned for. With no brothers guiding me safely past the witches’ doors, I got by with the nerves I had left. Sometimes, that jagged edge was bound to carve wounds.Unprotected, yes, but how long must it take to learn that there are no haunted houses or witches waiting to burn you alive in their ovens? How long before the stain of the witch evaporates and you can’t see it anymore? How long to know it was about the love, never the fear?When my mother died, I was in Vienna with Jodi, visiting a friend. On that very evening, we went to the old Opera House for a concert. Mom was a million miles from my thoughts when the three of us walked across the cold plaza, wisps of snow blowing by the lampposts. No transcendental message reached me, no extrasensory perception chilling my heart.I found out she was gone when I heard a progression of messages on our answering machine when we flew back to New York. No one in my family knew Jodi and I were in Europe. The messages went from somber to frantic to confused. “Must’ve thought I was ignoring them,” I told Jodi.“I’m sorry,” Jodi said.“Well, you know, I feel a little sad, but to be honest, the main thing I feel is relieved I didn’t get stuck flying out there for the funeral.”Such, then, was the state of healing. If you can’t fix it or it’s just too late, cut it loose. I’d won that. Enough time passed to make it stick. If I couldn’t love her, I had no business resenting or mourning her. As for the other shards, currents took most of them out of reach. Once in a while, an exceptional event brings us back in range, but what we sculpted of ourselves left little capacity for reconnection. To have ten siblings, two stepdads and a stepmom and about as much to do with any of them as I have with the manager of the local grocery is probably the worst result you could imagine, if you were me, eighteen years old, hitchhiking your way home to Binghamton, sun setting at a slow intersection, south of Utica. Maybe, that was what I needed protection from all along, not the witches, not the harridans of imagination, but worst of all, the incurable curse of indifference.

Here is the next to last chapter from my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door. To all of you who have stuck with the story, thanks. I'll wrap it up next week, then do the final fixing up and repairing before publication in the fall.

Anyone want to start this story from the first chapter is welcome to click here, then follow the links at the end of each chapter. You can also start in the middle form the "ARCHIVES" on the right.

A Young Man, Amost An Artist, A Failure

Val and I weren’t going to have many more conversations. Attenuated, strains made the fabric less colorful, less resilient.The last time we saw each other, I took her to a party at my cousin’s place. We argued on the way home, the last and only fight we ever had, a dispute so ridiculous I don’t remember what it was about.“You were pretty stressed,” she reminds me. “Conning everyone must’ve gobbled up all your resources.”“Living preposterously will do that. You know that Paul Simon song where he says, ‘Michigan seems like a dream to me now?’”“America. ‘We’ve all come to look for America…’”Val’s voice had not become more tuneful with age.“Binghamton seems a mash to me now,” I paraphrased. “I guess I was falling back all the time, trying to find the America we thought we had.”“Any luck?”“None. You really can’t go home. The most important thing I ever learned in my life, and it applies to everything, is that there aren’t any do-overs, no Mulligans. You get one shot at anything, and that’s it.”“Probably bigger than it sounds,” Val mused.“A truth shrouded in a cliche.”A certain ignorance is required, a fluffing of knowing, in going back to old rooms, thinking you can recover the empty coffee cups, the left behind newspapers or even the carefullest thoughts. If you’re like me, you might someday hit the skids so hard you’re hollow enough to try for it.Recklessness served me well until I hit dry land. It had to. A kid without a mother in a family without enough resources to rebuild beaches after a storm, I bounced around, unable to drop anchor… No, wait. Make that unwilling to drop anchor. Then, the dry land got me.Was it lack of trust in the official version or a passion for freedom? Maybe both, but the latter makes a better story. All my life, I left anything and anyone with too much ease, so much in fact I wonder if I ever really committed to anything other than awareness. Feeling it isn’t enough.That doesn’t bother me much. The adventures recklessness got me were thrilling, even as reminiscence. I did, though, want to know why, if for no other reason than that I’d caused too much damage.Once, when we still went to that big brick school house, one of the last with only two classrooms, the one parked on the hill with the huge yard around it, I fled early one day with my brothers. Only a short time remained before the yellow buses would flex open their doors to let us in for the ride home, but escape was on our minds. Mom’s boys, we ran full speed across the slight slope of the playground toward an opening between the trees, worn down by tire tracks on bare earth. My brothers held my hands, one on each side, to help me keep up, lifting my sneakers off the ground at top speed. We raced into the shade under the arch of free-growing limbs and out into the open spaces on the other side. We laughed, gasping for breath, traipsing along the dirt road, grass edging up past the stubble in the fields around us. Mom’s freewheeling boys.So, we got her love of freedom. We got her loving embrace. I don’t remember any time when we didn’t feel like we were champions, broken winners, of course, but always on top.Then, the thick brick of glass broke up. Each of us became our own shards. Freedom changes season when no one holds your hands and no arms sweep around you when you need a secure landing.By the time Mom called from Virginia, she had four more children, a second set of us, proving her reliability as a baby machine. She called from Richmond, a place I could drive to in a day now, but another universe then. “How are you doing, honey?” she asked. “Is everyone treating you all right?”I didn’t know how to answer that question when I was twelve years old. What did it even mean? I got through things. I got my three months of baseball and a nine month void. Every kindness, encouragement from a teacher, a girl who might like me, was a beam puncturing the redolent gray.“I’m okay,” I said.One day, a neighbor stopped me along the soft shoulder where our driveway met the road, imprisoning me with a stare in the way familiar adults were allowed to then.“Your father’s so proud of all of you,” she cooed. “I saw him the other day after he got all your report cards. You’re all doing so well in school.”“I failed.”“What?”“6B. I failed. I have to repeat.”“Oh.”I remember the raw chill the first time I felt hatred. Not anger, cold, amorphous hatred. Imagining Dad, standing there, smiling proudly, sent icy pebbles bouncing in my brain. The worst hate is the cold one because you’ve already lost.“I really think, Val, the only reason I went on living then was because, as far as I knew, I had no choice. When you have no choice, you have to try to make things better for yourself.”My mind’s eye saw the Nietzsche typed on paper and taped to my teenage bedroom wall: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”Suicide was a raft until conviction surged back.Surge back it did. The first time it powered up, I was sitting on a school bus on Robinson Avenue, watching the other kids leaving East Junior High. I promised myself that I would never make anyone else feel as bad and rejected as they made me feel. “What happened?”“I don’t even remember, but it was the lowest low a thirteen year old can get. I just felt like shit. Nobody cared about me at all, but something inside me knew I could make it. I was better.”“Look out world…?”“Not just yet. I had a lot to learn, but look at me now, all these years later, all the great experiences, a marriage that lasted, money in my pocket…”“Et cetra, et cetra et cetra…”“…and on.”The thing is, when nobody loves you, you can go with the majority, throwing in with the spurning crowd, or you can love yourself with all you’ve got. The stew got frothy for a while, but I’m here because I decided to discover and appreciate the unique creation of me on a chilly spring afternoon in 1962.Bob Dylan, for fifty years now, always seems to have something to tell me:

“Got a pile of sins to pay for and I ain’t got time to hide.”

A reckless seed planted, the other side of loving yourself is not enough left for everyone else. As a reservoir, love’s capacity is limited. There is not enough for every dry season. Some summer morning, sun on your face, the deep greens and soft wind may con you into thinking you have enough love with which to paint the world and have it last a lifetime. Don’t fall for it. It isn’t true, but bless you for wishing it were.

Spring failed toward summer in 1966. I hung out in an abandoned office into June, pretending to peddle encyclopedias after my boss quit, then cold calling door to door with a team while a new sales manager tooled around the rural roads, picking us up and dropping us off. Riding shotgun, I listened with my boss outside a trailer while Jerry, a big, burly, rambunctious guy out of New York City did his pitch.“This is the only time I ever come between a man and his wife,” Jerry bellowed, voice whirling through the screen door, spreading out into the night.He was parking his big ass between a couple he’d charmed into submission, unfolding a pleasantly colored contract on a coffee table in front of them.“If you watch closely, you’ll see that my fingers never leave my hands.”Bill, our sales manager behind the wheel, and I joined Jerry’s customers in laughter.Ten minutes later, Jerry thumped into the backseat, still stuffing materials in his briefcase.“You got ‘em?” Bill asked, turning slightly toward the rear, sure of the answer.“I got ‘em. Fucking yahoos. Had ‘em eating out of my hands. Didn’t know what hit ‘em. ‘Your encyclopedias will arrive in about ten days. I’ll come by to make sure everything’s just like I promised.’ Sure I will.”“Fuck you, Jerry. You’ll be back in the garment district, selling cheap underwear, by then.”Jerry’s encyclopedia selling career was a lark, a week long jaunt for easy money upstate. Even then, New York City was way more than two-hundred miles away.When Bill invited me to play gypsy with him and travel to Springfield, Massachusetts, to sell books there, I was so loose I barely had to lift anchor. Springfield was where he hid his pregnant girlfriend while his wife and children got weekends in Utica. On Sunday, I left my room at the YMCA for breakfast at a downtown diner. Without cold calls to go on, I went walking, stopping halfway across an old bridge over the Connecticut River, the full green foothills girdling the valley, much like my home in Binghamton, both spaces markers where I waited to identify myself in place. Like most of my past and many times again in my future, I was open to whatever was going to come. I had no direction and little that pulled me.By week’s end, with Bill’s situation untenable and me like a deadweight on his tether, he delivered me back to New York, leaving me on the corner where Route 20 on its poor man’s track parallel to the State Thruway intersected Route 12. 12 angled 90 miles south through the farmlands and forgettable towns until spilling into Binghamton. I was going home.I stood by the side of the road, putting my thumb out as cars crossed the intersection with the traffic signal. No hurry, nowhere to be. “Well, man,” I said to myself as if there was a conversation waiting, “you finally hit bottom. Your friends are jerk offs who cheat on their wives, and the only job worse than the one you just lost is magazine salesman. What’s next? The circus?”It struck me as funny with a wide-open future ahead of me, as a train wreck of a life might seem at eighteen, a comedy of my own ridiculous design. I’d hurt everyone who cared about me. I left Ginny to fend for herself, running off to distract myself by jumping the bones of just about every girl who got in the vicinity of “Yes,” until dwindling down to a graveled patch of “Maybe.” Joyce, I seemed to have assisted into the gutter. My family…? Mutually assured destruction, I thought.You can look at yourself from every angle and never run out of angles. I should be patient with myself. I didn’t know which one of those people I was or, consequently, where I was going with my choices.Tramps, we used to call them, idling, nothing to do but absorb life, unsure about living it.The long, August dusk softened the broken down, reemerging forests and earnest farm fields around me. Inside, I still felt happy; outside, lost or unfound. There’s a quiet inside every humid summer dusk. Disruptions, cars — for instance, are exaggerated by the violence of disrupting it. At eighteen, the future is so vast, it either thrills or frightens the shit out of you. Cling to security and you’re a dead duck; don’t and you’re likely to cause some damage. You have to hope it’s recoverable damage.Who had a map? Who could tell me anything? Had anyone been here before? Holden Caulfield came close, but he was so weak and envious. Would Holden have maneuvered his awkward way into Mary Jane’s bed, back in California, or looked away, saving it for wittily protective anecdotes? No, there was nobody else much like me.Soon, Henry Miller would soak my brain with insights available nowhere else. Although I would never be an emigre banging my way through Paris, I recognized that same, hard oneness, me against the world, laughing at it, jabbing it, letting love take me over without falling completely for it, my own best resource. Friends came and got discarded. If I survived losing my brothers, a fate well on its way to completion, I could lose anyone and anything and still go on.Like Henry, I stayed sane by writing about it, intellectualizing everything as a way of throwing a tarp over the convulsions, contents abandoned but neutralized.On the cusp, I didn’t know this was coming as dusk deepened on the road south of Utica, but I felt goddamned happy. I was free. No one had been allowed to do more harm than I could survive.

We Kicked an Empty Can Down the American Road is chapter fifteen from my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door.

We will be wrapping up the story in a couple of weeks. If you are new to it or just need a refresher, you can start at the beginning by clicking here and following the links at the end of each chapter.

Thanks to those of you who have been following all along. I hope this has been an enjoyable way to get in some free, extra summer reading.

We Kicked An Empty Can Down The American Road

Easy enough now, looking back, to see the decline from a distance, the eroding bulwark, the leaky center that failed to hold, pools of discontent washing against it, no good light at the end of any tunnel. Time clarifies. Up close, you’ve still got to live your life. The churn of events obscured the horizon in every directions.Drenching rain flooded the gutters the first time I rode a bus in downtown Buffalo, a city taller, faster and more tightly wound than Binghamton, the town where my hometown draft board sent me on a false lead. The last forty-eight hours, I’d bounced from one unfamiliar place to the next stranger until I landed in a square where I had to figure out which building housed the local Selective Service offices. One reason I’ll always love Buffalo, that Buffalo, was the kindness that helped me get the wobble out of my skinny legs. My witch protectors were gone — forever as it turned out. But my strangers were there, again.Our first morning in Buffalo, Cindi and I left boxes still filled with books and vinyl records and walked for the first time through Forest Lawn, the sprawling central cemetery, the scenic route we’d walk many times, from Delaware Avenue to Main Street. We followed a map bought at a gas station to Leroy Avenue where my draft board, after turning down my own choices — VISTA, the Peace Corps and Sloan Kettering Hospital — promised me a job “in the national interest.”Except it wasn’t.“They send conscientious objectors here without warning me,” the executive director at the vocational rehab center said. “I wish I had jobs for all of you, but I don’t.”“Motherfuckers,” I swore as Cindi and I traipsed back across Forest Lawn, old growth trees soaring overhead, softening the rumble of the city. “What am I supposed to do now?”“I don’t know,” she answered. “We got this far. We’ll think of something.”Back in our apartment, I found the previous tenants telephone still had a dial tone. Traffic on Delaware Avenue, buses the loudest, rumbled one story below. I called our landlord. After a year of waiting to get directions that turned out to be bogus, I buzzed with a need to fend for myself.“Sorry to do this, man, but now that we’re here, I found out my draft board fucked me. There’s no job here. We have to go back home. We don’t have any money. Can we get some of our rent back?”“Don’t panic. Maybe I can do something. I’ll call you back,” he said.I called the Friends Committee in Philadelphia. Quakers had set up a national resource for conscientious objectors. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” the guy who picked up my call advised. “They’ll just come and get you and charge you with draft evasion. Nobody cares if they’re the ones who screwed up. They’ve got a war to run, and you’ll get zero sympathy for getting stuck in Buffalo when other guys are dying in Vietnam.”“So, what the fuck do I do then?”“The only thing I can suggest is finding a job there somehow, something that qualifies.”In town for one day, I had no idea where I’d start looking and decided, on the spot, to ignore him and, one way or another, get back to Binghamton, even if Cindi and I had to hitchhike.“Try a hospital,” he suggested. “The draft boards like to think of working in the national interest as conscientious objectors cleaning toilets and shuffling bedpans.” “I don’t know what to do,” I told Cindi, who stood by, handing me cigarettes while I talked fast into the phone, scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas. I’d gotten used to the idea of not going to jail after all. Now, it was coming back, along with some guilt about what I’d accepted. Peace felt worth going to jail for, but cleaning bedpans? It was like sitting on my ass watching sitcoms while a tornado tore up the town outside.“Great. The fucking phone’s dead.” I slammed the receiver down. “They must’ve caught me making that last call to Philadelphia.”We looked at each other, then around the room.“We should just pack up whatever we can carry and go catch a bus home,” I thought out loud. “What are we going to do with all the books, leave them here? I guess…”Someone knocked on our door. Our lives were about to change.Our across the hall neighbor, Susan, a hippie woman our age, was there. Cindi and I met her when we were unloading.“Sorry to bug you guys, but Marty’s on the phone. He said he couldn’t get through on yours. Is something wrong with your phone?”“With our phone and a lot more…”Marty was our landlord of one day.I followed Susan into her apartment, relieved to see hippie it was, with lots of cushions and color. Record albums leaned randomly against the furniture, curtains thrown open for lots of light.“Hello.”“I think I can help you,” Marty said.“Really? Like how?”“I have a friend at Buffalo General, a doctor, but he’s also a writer, like you. He just published his first novel. He thinks he might be able to get you a job there.” Two fast interviews later, I carried a letter to the local draft board in Buffalo, asking to get the hospital approved for my two years service “in the national interest.” It was raining like crazy outside, and I was soaked.“This should be okay,” the clerk said. “We’ll need to confirm with your draft board in Binghamton, but I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t approve it.”Outside, in a square dominated by department stores and a county library sprawling east like a squared off supertanker on dry land, a damp sun burned through a break in the deep overcast. There wasn’t a lot of time to think. First, I had to figure out how to get home in this complicated city with its radiant street patterns, then get my head right for starting a job for which I was manifestly unqualified. “If I were you, I wouldn't say anything about your draft status,” the department manager told me. “A lot of the guys are veterans from World War II. They won’t understand.”Identity scrubbed, I wandered in the next afternoon, a maintenance man on the evening shift, my specialty: cleaning air-conditioning filters in a two block hospital complex.From the inside, I watched the America hallucination, Buffalo its microcosm, fall apart. For twenty years, I saw how destructive unfixed plumbing and ignored infrastructure can be.

Speeding southwest on the New York State Thruway, on my way to a business appointment in Meadville, Pennsylvania, I was wrong, thinking as I listened to Nixon resign that something better would struggle like a phoenix out of the disaster he created, the promise of the Sixties in America might surface.I’d been living in Buffalo for five years. Cindi left me after one year. I married someone else and became a father. The Sixties radical who flew solo without wings in defying the draft and the war sold life insurance now, his future an island so small and fruitless you might skip it if you spotted it on the horizon. He did.Nixon was the biggest of the worst in 1974, and in the grand American tradition of never accepting responsibility for wrongdoing or expecting it from our leaders, we forgave his crimes. Ford looked the nation in the eye and said that healing meant pretending a monster never stalked our neighborhood. His Dr. Strangelove, Henry Kissinger, walked free too, neither facing trial for killing hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, smashing Cambodia on their own authority and lying about it or even for myriad, lesser political corruptions. We were ordered to look the other way, and that was enough.Sprawling acres of steel plants got torn down south of Buffalo. The stink and smoke that introduced you to Lackawanna as you rode high up on the skyway cleared, vistas toward the lake now marked by scars of demolished plants and wasted shoreline. Jobs went too. Nothing got fixed, although talking about fixes was a popular game at election time.“Bedlam Steel,” as my friend George called the stretch of foundries and sheds strung across the west face of Lackawanna, was prosperous enough to pay him well for filling in for vacations each summer. He was expected to do little more than rest up before returning to school. He hid away in the rafters and edited his poems.“It’s crazy in there, but the money’s great, especially when you consider it’s for doing nothing,” he said, smiling but puzzled.It was a symptom, standards and values discarded. A little to the east, Republic Steel was also flattened in South Buffalo. Without enough Walmarts or McDonalds to absorb the slack, headlines lamented each wave of layoffs in pulsing boldface. Jobs went away. Taxes that paved roads and uniformed police and firemen blew off with them. From shore to shore, it was the same. Prosperity buffering structural weaknesses for decades went away, leaving exposed a sickly consumerist culture, its heart distributed around thousands of shopping malls. Anyone willing to look saw that America was a shattered illusion that didn’t mean anything anymore. The American Dream was a distraction for television, in reruns, waiting for a next season. The Civil War limped into a featureless phase, lead by colorless men in suits.

“How did all that make you feel?” Val asked.“As much as I saw of it — clearly,” I said, “I was mostly ambiguous. How could anyone with healthy lungs feel badly about Bethlehem Steel’s pollution no longer stinking up square miles from Lake Erie all through Lackawanna? I felt sorry that so many people didn’t have good-paying jobs to go to anymore, but why didn’t anyone come up with better alternatives? Where was the leadership?”“You might’ve just as easily asked whatever became of America?”“Jesus, yes, all those windbags going on and on about the American Dream and how they were going to preserve that and the family farm too. They fed their mush to an audience craving something easy to digest, some simple, half-assed fable to believe in. God forbid they’d have to turn off their televisions and think.”“A little harsh, aren’t you?”“It’s a reaction. As the Seventies waltzed on, I developed an allergy to bullshit. We still had a chance, I thought, for a while there. When Carter let the draft dodgers come back, it seemed like we might be growing up after all. Then, we all bought into the superannuated actor, the hood ornament, and things went downhill fast, the them versus us thing got rolling.”“It was always there.” She waved off my argument. “Prosperity just kept it fat and quiet, but since that all depended on an open-ended state of war, when the war machine slowed down, the American illusion caved. It’s not so complicated.”

When Cindi and I packed up our books and records, leaving the boxes for her brother and stepfather to load onto their pickup the next day, we got on the Greyhound to Buffalo with just a couple of bags. Since learning where we were going, we talked about making the return trip in two years. In the fog of big changes, a fix like that keeps your head balanced. But if we looked the other way, rolling back two years, I was engaged to Maureen, about to start my last year of high school, and Cindi was in exile, staying with a family friend in Florida. Two years was so much longer than two years, at least for us and our uncommon step styles.We’d shucked everything except each other. It was foolish, especially in a world as much in flux as ours to guess at anything two years down the road. But we did. It kept us on our feet.

Take the Last Exit is the 14th chapter in my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door. For those of you who have been reading the weekly installments, I want to let you know we are nearing the end. The last chapter will be posted by the end of August.

Then, after going back to fix the potholes, missing pieces and so on, I'll release a final version, in print and eBook, probably in September. Depends on how many repairs need to be made.

If you're a newcomer or just got lost on the way, you can find the first chapter by clicking here. All following chapters and connected by links at the end of each one.

Take the last Exit

Never knowing for sure but sensing it was the last summer I’d see summer fill the leafy hills bracing the rivers around Binghamton, I walked down Hawley Street a little after noon, most days. Trees sagged over the sidewalks, the run of shade broken by the back entrance to Sears Roebuck. One o’clock was my time to take over for Joe at the secondhand, wooden desk in the second floor walk up office of the Broome County Peace Center. I liked the days when Joe stuck around to talk shop. Peace was even less popular then. The office became too quiet after he left.In 1968, peace activists were a blot on the landscape of American muscle-flexing. Shoving our uniforms and flag in the world’s faces made for a healthy economy. The Chamber of Commerce sang that tune all day long, and the customers danced. For Joe and me, the job of selling peace was like persuading a tuned up bulldozer with a tankful of gas to go weed and water a flower garden instead of crushing undefended, Third World landscapes. We doubled as draft counselors. In one exciting episode, we helped plan the escape of a deserter into Canada. Our blows against the machine were minuscule, pin pricks, but at least we were doing something.Mostly, we played out the summer as hippies. A roughened landscape threw our friends into sharp contrast.“The problem,” Joe told me, “is that we never developed a leadership class in America. We end up with the bozo with the biggest mouth and easiest morals. Somebody decent comes along, they kill him.”In a decade poisoned by assassinations and racist murders, the details needn’t be talked through. We saw what happened, and we knew why. We expected worse.The landscape grew cluttered with things undone.One miserable June morning, my clock radio yanked me awake, telling me someone shot Bobby Kennedy in the head. Excited, I’d stayed up late to watch the California returns, not dragging myself upstairs until I knew Bobby won. Now, I flung my sheet on the floor and screamed, “Fuck!”I was alone in the house. Disbelief rocked the fog out of my head. They couldn’t do this again.A celebrity linked to the Kennedy family — Andy Williams, I think — seized a place in front of the camera to ease fears. “Bobby Kennedy,” he said, “will live to play touch football again.” It was a thoughtless resurrection of a legacy. Everyone inside the hospital already knew it was over. Bobby would never play anything again. No thought would echo in his mind or crease his brow. You get one brain. When it’s shot, so are you.“If McCarthy can pull it off at the convention, maybe there’s a chance,” Joe speculated, a couple months later.Our minority was so small, we had to pump it up by junking realism. Not only would McCarthy never get a chance against the machine, not even a voice, but the Democrats, our only hope, were gearing up to turn loose cops to kick the shit out of unarmed hippies.Val watched it on TV. “I couldn’t believe it was happening in America,” she told me over the phone that night. “The cops were pushing protestors through plate glass windows and beating them with clubs. It was all on TV.”“The whole world’s watching,” the protestors chanted at the rioting cops. “The whole world’s watching.”What difference did that make? The international bully marched like a shredder on wheels through impoverished Vietnamese villages. What were a few bruised hippies to the coordinators of massacres?“Doesn’t look good, though, does it?” Joe asked.Neither of us saw what was coming, McCarthy’s losing the least of it.“We’ve always got Vice President Lump.”Joe shook his head.“The peace candidate.”That summer, 1968, we were losing. Our best hope was to make it uncomfortable for mass murderers, dance and drop out and make them look like mindless mastodons trampling the harvest. And I was swinging looser than ever.There was the break with my family, a swamp of unfriendly chemistries, viscosities so unalike we spilled off in separate streams, divided by bulky mountains. It wasn’t new, but the times became charged around us. When I leaked off — or dropped out as we said then — nobody hustled over to bring me back, and I didn’t look over my shoulder. It was mutual. We’d given up on each other.After collecting my diploma, I knocked around a bigger, emptier house with just Dad still there. We didn’t cross paths often. I came in late. He left early. Together for an evening, we passed it playing chess, his dazzling ability to concentrate winning out over my habit of being carried away with passions buzzing between my ears. I was never angry with him anymore. I liked him. He’d shed acid layers of unhappiness as we grew up and released our grips, exposing a gentleness that hadn’t gotten enough air to breathe before. He either didn’t notice or, more likely, didn’t care that my hair descended over my ears, a radical statement against the establishment in those days.My brothers noticed. It was an unlucky coincidence when I waited for the light to change at Washington and Court on a Saturday afternoon and my brother pulled up, his family with him, staring out the windows of his car. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months. “Jesus Christ!” he declared through the driver’s side window. “Oh, no, forget it. It’s just my brother.”This passed for humor in 1968.My other brothers were worse, having assumed I didn’t exist, long hair or short, living or dead. Years passed. The guys who once defended me from witches were gone.Love’s a fluid. But broken, it hardens into bricks like glass. Fluids reconnect, seeking a level. Bricks of glass just sit there. They can’t be rejoined, all hopeful illusions aside.In the heated jumble of elements we all swam in, chemicals swirled, separated, recombined and reacted.TV, magazines and newspapers aligned to paint a picture of hippies that none of us recognized. If we hated the cruelties of war, they posted us up as passive flower children, simple and innocent — and stupid. Women demanding equality? Bra burners. Activists for racial equality? Nigger lovers. When we dreamed about expanding consciousness, we were doped up hippies and naval gazers. Before the Sixties, status quo was a discardable term. During, it lifted up like a concrete bunker. After, it refused to let anything undissolved erode its surface. Nixon saw it. He mobilized the “silent majority,” an amalgam of haves aligned against change or giving up turf, determined to continue dominating the world and gobbling its resources. Silently. The silent majority redefined America as something new: theirs, exclusive, without concessions.And there was our merry band, barefoot, musical and high. Of course, we lost. Groups weakened by empathy usually lose. In the mosh pit of America, dropping out carried with it a gift for seeing clearly, detached and at a distance. A small, unarmed legion of what the news managers put their minds together to call “radicals” charged like fools against a muscled monster in power. Really, it surprises me to this day how much we got done, we were so outnumbered. We couldn’t end the Vietnam War. The monster lost that all by itself, lumbering along, overweight, passionless, guided by something less than Mensa candidates. But we made everyone aware enough of the deranged mentality of persistent war that fifty years passed before the dozing silent majority gave in again to the Pentagon propaganda machine. And that was just the political side. At home, we upended everything, and the landslide keeps rolling downhill.Sorting out relationships took an unfamiliar, new world slant.Cindi and I read books, took long walks and listened to music on the stereo she hooked up in her studio apartment. Sometimes we read together out loud, taking turns with chapters from Up the Down Staircase and The Harrad Experiment. By summer’s end, I moved in with her, although we kept our amateur marriage open.All things in a tangle around us, my draft board ordering me to get on the bus to Syracuse to pee in a little bottle, we dropped farther out. Cindi first rented a place with my sister on the West Side. Nothing better to do, I’d hang out all night with her, having sex on the couch, then walking up the quiet streets to the all-night Dunkin’ Donuts, wandering a little more until dawn leaked down between the foothills along the Susquehanna. This went on for a few weeks until my sister summoned the morality patrol, otherwise recognized as my brother.After a meeting with the other Peace Center coordinators, I walked down Main Street, passing Central High as daylight cooled on the sidewalks. Across from the school, Montgomery Ward managed to survive. The got over my leaving them, two years before, without a qualified stock boy/sporting goods salesman on an ugly, gray Monday when I lost Ginny, my apartment and my faith all at once. I economized, getting my personal devastation gathered together for one big bomb. Early evening throwing long shadows from the soon to be lost American Elms, I glanced down Mather Street, past the phone booth where I shivered in the cold to get my turn at talking with Ginny, where I stood like a trained ape on the Monday when everything went to hell and waited for a call that never came. It took a year to heal and another to figure out who I wanted to be: the freethinking hippie writer and peace activist I was right now.I turned the corner from Main and saw my brother waiting on the sidewalk.“You’re not going inside,” he told me, without my asking.“What about…?”“She’s not here. Her mother and father came to get her and took all her stuff with them.”“What the fuck’s going on?”“Well,” he shrugged, “I’m throwing you out. You weren’t supposed to move in. You had no business spending all your time here. And what was going on… Jesus, come on. Up all night on the couch, your sister trying to sleep in the next room?”I found a phone booth and dialed Cindi’s parents’ number. Surprisingly, her mother let her take the phone.“What happened?”“When I came home from work, your sister and brother were waiting for me, just standing there in the kitchen. They had all my clothes stuffed in brown paper bags. I couldn’t believe it. Then, my mother and father rang the bell. Your brother must’ve called them and told them whatever he wanted them to think. Maybe I’m a whore, your know? I had to go with them. Where else was I going to go?”Circumstances mold reality.Next morning, I helped Cindi to settle in temporarily with Lloyd, one of the other Peace Center coordinators, one too involved with dope to be relied on but a good guy generally. I assumed Lloyd would try to fuck Cindi and maybe would, but our choices were few until she found a place of her own.Why I never fell in love with her is more mysterious to than why I fell in love with anyone else when it just seemed to coalesce out of ephemeral chaos. The way the cards stacked up, Cindi and I were a perfect match that didn’t click into place that way. Maybe the love thing had been swept out of me. Maybe there was just too much else going on to make room for that kind of love.I’ll always remember the first time I noticed her, It was so odd. On my way out of the small convenience store next to school, consuming my then standard lunch of Coca Cola and potato chips, I turned back after she passed and saw her calves. No kidding. Her calves. Before or since, I never got hot over anyone’s lower legs, but it happened. The mysteries of the human heart… or wherever it is that attachments swirl into form. We started spending time together, sharing our stories. She was as hippie as me, wrote poetry, hated the war and was also jumping away from a screwed up family. We swung together through the last months of school. Enough tradition lurked under my hair to get me into a rented tux for our prom, and when my diploma was handed to me, I raised it over my head to wave it at the top row of bleachers where she was sitting, getting the only laugh of the evening. God only knows why I felt good about that, being a four time dropout. It left me with no way to stay out of the draft. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. Nothing scared me anymore, except the dark, another story all its own.I imagined Mabel, the clerk at my draft board, waiting with an induction letter in her hand. A diploma touched my fingers, she dropped her envelope in the postal box. The killing machine wanted my body. I went into a kind of stall. After ducking out of my physical for the Navy, I decided I was never going into any military boot camp. As the war heated up, consuming my friend Denny and others, seeming all the crazier as time passed, I knew wasn’t going there either. “Are you willing to go to federal prison for your beliefs?” Eugene asked me, the first time I climbed up the stairs to the Peace Center, following up on a story in the newspaper.“Compared to Vietnam, killing and being killed, do I have another choice?”Eugene founded the Peace Center, raising money for rent and a telephone, and counseled guys like me about dealing with our draft boards. He looked the part, too, with long brown hair, the serious glasses of a student devoted to reading and an earnestness expressed in gestures.“You’ve already got your notice?”“Just for a physical, so far. I have to catch the piss in a bottle bus to Syracuse next week. Bastards move fast.” Cindi sat next to me and squeezed my hand.“The war’s worse than they’re admitting in the newspapers. They need a lot of bodies. They go after guys without deferments like you’re red meat.” “So, do I just refuse and go to jail or what happens?”“We can stall for a while. Who knows? Maybe the election will motivate Johnson to settle the war before Nixon weasels his way in. You’d still get drafted, but without a war, it’s a whole different situation.”Eugene adjusted his brown, framed glasses and swept some hair behind his left ear. “By stalling, I mean that you do what you should have done a year ago, if anyone was around to explain your options. You file as a conscientious objector.”“Am I qualified? I thought…”“You go to church?”“Fuck no.”“Then, you’re not qualified, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to file. You always have a right to try. It slows the process. They won’t induct you while your application’s being considered. They’ll shoot you down. They shoot everyone down. But you appeal. They have to wade through that too. Take the maximum time allowed for every step. The longer it takes, the better chance you have that things will get better.”“Should I start going to church?”“It’s too late now, but don’t let this be too big a joke. The most likely thing that will happen is that you end up with two years in federal prison.”“Jesus… Well, better than dying and killing for nothing,” I said.“Well, here’s the other thing you need to know.”He looked at me seriously.“Draft evasion,” he said, “is the only felony that does not disqualify you for being drafted again. They can just keep drafting you. They’ve been doing that.”

Cindi found the studio apartment on Hawley Street in one day. Furnished, it was easy to settle into. A small kitchen was just off the main room, a shared, but well-kept bathroom upstairs. When I kissed her goodbye, the first night, and walked up tp Court Street to hitchhike home, she was too tired to care about being alone. In spite of what my family claimed, we had not shacked up or planned to. For my part, I hadn’t planned to do anything.As a draft eligible young man in perfect health in 1968, I’d have to be delusional to imagine I had much to say about my future. The war owned my generation, whether we went, skipped or conjured a respectable excuse to stay. Since I would not fight a preposterous battle against a tiny country set up as an enemy, my choices were going to jail or abandoning my country for Canada. The frosty north was starting to look attractive. Whatever I picked, the chapter had to close by the end of summer.Eugene’s strategy for stalling in motion, I helped Cindi get settled, thinking I had around six weeks to survive under my own power. A sea change was coming. I couldn't stop it. My family now as finished with me as I was with them, likewise for Cindi, I started staying overnight, then moved in full time. So it was that Cindi held my hand when I sat for draft counseling and kissed me goodbye me at the door when I got on the bus to Syracuse for my pre-induction physical. We learned to cook the simplest meals for each other, making a ritual of rigatoni in butter and garlic sauce, and five mornings a week, I went out in the fresh light to meet her when she walked across the Susquehanna River bridge after working all night. Hippies, we agreed that marriage was unnecessary, but expected by everyone else. Nothing about our lives was settled. For now, we bought cheap, matching wedding rings at Woolworths and cooked up a story about taking a bus to North Carolina, where we were old enough without consent, and getting a marriage license. The fiction satisfied our landlord, and it surprised us how readily everyone we knew accepted what we told them. Eventually, we even got to spend New Year’s Eve in Cindi’s old bedroom, her parents asleep nearby, without, as they said then, benefit of matrimony.Without a future, we cobbled together a working present. We waited. I wrote my first novel, and the least expected thing of all happened — my draft board decided they did not want me in their Army.

Rationale for Baking Cookies is Chapter 13 from my new serialized novel, The Witch Next Door. I've promised to wrap it up by the end of summer, and we're on schedule.

If you missed part of the story or recently dropped from the sky, you can start with Chapter One by clicking here, then step right along in links at the end of each chapter. Just a quick note: although the book so far may seem to have a kind of randomness, a chronological illogic, it does have a plan. Taking it in order works best. Trust me, not your common sense or intuition.

Prefer to read straight through in a few days? You can find some opportunities with my baker's dozen of finished books, six of them novels, by clicking on my Amazon Author page. Otherwise, come on aboard and read about my Rationale for Baking Cookies.

Thanks.

Rationale for Baking cookies

“I’d rather be unemployed than eat shit,” I told Roscoe, the scruffy manager of our agency’s gas station/offsite training area. “What are you going to do for money? You quit, so you can’t get unemployment. Why not keep the job and look around while you’re still getting paid?”Roscoe’s concern surprised me. I imagined that he’d be one of those happy to see me exit. In seven years with the agency, I’d raced from boy wonder to irritating outcast. I’d jumped ahead of myself, taking credit for good luck, alienating people, some of them Roscoe’s buddies.“I’m starting my own business. This place is a dead end for me now, you know, with the new asshole in charge.”“Think about it,” Roscoe urged.I had. Too many things to fix and not enough reason to fix them, not seeing yet that the reason they needed fixing was because I either broke or let them be broken.Why was I getting advice from Roscoe, anyway? Yes, he was a great guy to hang around with, sometimes hilarious, but last year, his chain smoking put him under the knife. Half of his jaw and the tissue around it got cut out, a surgeon excavating a cancerous landscape. He resumed smoking before leaving the hospital. “My old lady and her whory daughter are driving me nuts,” he griped as if he read my mind, holding up a lit cigarette between his fingers. “What the fuck else have I got?”Roscoe’s semi-marriage, the source of some of his funniest stories, had its screws shook loose by his girlfriend’s daughter’s awkwardly evolving womanhood, a hormonal calamity cascading deeper into his universe. I thought of Kurt Vonnegut writing that he was, “Committing suicide by cigarette.”“She’s fourteen going on twenty. We can’t keep her down, and the way she dresses, the boys are all sniffing around. At that age, you remember, all we had on our minds was pussy…”“Some still do,” I interrupted.“Yeah, right. Me for one. But, geez, my old lady, if she caught me screwing around, she’d cut my balls off.”Roscoe’s unbalanced face, the left side hollowed out at the bottom, reduced this possibility to sadness. The subject changed, and although I was mostly killing time, released from all responsibilities the day after I handed in my resignation, I walked the block down Leroy to the main building for the agency where I’d traipsed my learning curve from not quite thirty to the horizon of forty. In the past year, misjudgments and inexperience I refused to admit lead to irreversible mistakes, but I learned more here, about myself and others, than everywhere else. Now, I was unwelcome in the building, but my peculiar, unbroken state of employment entitled me to the parking lot.While I imagined myself as right on track with my plans, fate set me up as a distracted hiker about to be knocked off the trail in a mudslide. Shedding the craggy classrooms of my twenties, I now had a clear plan for myself. “Your twenties are your chance to get all the shit out of your system,” I repeated. I had plenty of that, but there was more. Twenty, I made my break, burning bridges in a way that left me no way back to the city, Binghamton, where everything before took place or the people I knew there. I built myself pretty much from scratch and discovered I could be an astonishing fuck up but still keep a grip on passion and wonder. I knew what I was supposed to do.“I was supposed to write,” I said.Val nodded.“If not, what good was all that experience? You tumbled up toward thirty with stories to tell.” I made a plan. If the shortest distance between two points is straight through, I’d find the least tiring good-paying job in reach. So, a four time high school dropout, who stayed on track for a diploma, finally, because it shielded him from the Vietnam draft, paid a fee for night school in Buffalo.Adult night school was different because they didn’t assume you were an idiot right out of the gates, a scrambled mess of possibilities who had to be forced by law to sit at wooden desks and listen all day. You volunteered and paid your way. I went back to school to become a stationery engineer, tending high pressure boilers, reading the newspaper and playing cards. If ever there was a job that looked easy but paid well, it was shift engineer. Once your shingle got hung, you were obliged to take two clock rounds per day, checking vital instruments and recording their readings — in pre-digital days — on written charts. The other six hours, you were forced to find ways to pass the idle hours creatively. Sometimes, you dialed up your wife or girlfriend, or you might hang around with the guys on the loading dock, swapping stories. In the unlikely event of an emergency, you called the chief and waited for him to pull up his pants and drive in.I believed I could handle that, and it would leave me time and energy to sit with Bic in hand, writing stories, two hours a day, as prescribed by Henry Miller. What I landed instead was the most demanding, confounding work I ever took on, days and weeks marked by duties I never expected to perform, aided only whatever involuntary teachers I could summon to help me through it.“The thing is, Val, I caked it. A me I knew very little about got in gear, and I caked it. I was the golden boy, the guy who pulled off stuff they didn’t think could be done.”“And what else…?”“Okay, what else?”“And your head got so big,” she said, “nobody else could squeeze in the same room with you. Nobody else measured up to your standards, did they?”“Alex did,” I reacted, defensively.“How did that turn out? Where’s that partnership now?”“In da ditch,” I mimicked. “Who’d imagine a guy as smart as Alex would just spin his wheels…? For decades!”“So, he didn’t quite cut it either, did he?”“Stuck in a time warp. Clock’s still ticking, but the hands don’t move.”I walked back to my car down the quiet, residential street, ten years later, in the detached fragment of a near death experience, scanning scenes, friends, opponents, students and teachers, before feeling my shoes hit the sidewalk again, made richer but now on my own, no bosses to confuse with head games, no novices to mentor and no more head-turning feats to impress the stalled and wary. No surprise, I’d driven off the cliff myself.

Actors talk about searching for a character inside themselves when they go to work on a new play or a movie. Paul Sorvino almost dumped his role in Goodfellas because he didn’t believe he could scare up the coldblooded character needed for it. Then, one day, he looked hard in the mirror and saw the creature waiting. He wrestled with his soul over it for months after the movie was finished. Who the hell wanted a passionless killer, a machine, willing to mobilize on call inside?After all these years, it’s uncanny that people are blind to the devils and angels mingling as their souls. I mean, what’s the point of virtue if it’s involuntary? Are we good because that’s all that’s in our nature?Until we’re not?As Sorvino found, Hitlers, Stalins, and the Donner Party daily attend the happy hour, listening to music and conversations in our heads. Who gets called up next? Devil or angel, as Bobby Vee’s song went in the Sixties? All those people ready to slip into the costume your friends, family and neighbors point to and call “you…?” You’d probably rather be blind than look at the freaks, malicious actors and loiterers gamboling around in there.It my twenties, it first hit me that we’re all actors, taking on parts in front of an authentic self. If the capacity didn’t exist in us, we wouldn’t sit still admiring plays. It knocked me out to see how artfully skilled performers slipped in and out of characters without losing a center. In my thirties, I watched myself try on masks. It was interesting, being someone new for a while without changing clothes.Oh, sure, I reprised some roles. I got to be the bad husband and bad boyfriend again, and the reckless lover. I played head games with my bosses and risked mutilating the best of what I gained. But I also played rainmaker for the first time, showering dozens of people with money they never expected to earn. And I learned to be something I’d never been, member of a functioning family, an unexpected gift that kept giving. Thirty, I shut my eyes, plugged my nose and jumped in the pool. I used everything I knew about fixing buildings to massage two structural cripples through Buffalo winters, polishing them up with a crew thrown together from parts retrieved from a human scrap heap. Alone in the middle of a night when a pump failed, I transformed the pipes behind walls in one building into an extended, temporary low pressure boiler. I pulled it off so seamlessly nobody else noticed. Then, piece by piece, I assembled a team of discards and gave them jobs, sixty rejects earning living wages by the time I was done. As it happened, my corner of the business generated so much cash that the rest of the place had to lose ten-thousand dollars a month, just to remain nonprofit, a feat achieved with impressive reliability. If I’d only had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut about it… On the day Roscoe tried to talk me into staying, I walked away from the mess. It still worked for everyone else. Sixty broken people had jobs. An incompetent by design nonprofit agency continued riding their backs for survival. But it was a mess because I left it without a single friend remaining. I polluted my own legacy.That’s the way the cookie crumbles, I guess. So, what do you do?Not a tough question. You start baking new cookies. David Stone
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Ends of Things is Chapter Twelve from serialized novel, the Witch Next Door.

The story will come to a conclusion before summer does. Then, after some patching, fixing and polishing, it will go between soft covers on Amazon and into the ebook marketplace.

If you are new here or may have missed something, you jump back in time to the first chapter by clicking here and following the links to all the ones that follow. If you like to just grab hold of something already done and waiting for you to dig in, you can find my baker's dozen of finished books on my Amazon Author Page.

ends of things

The Iowa Tests of Basic Skills bumped us off the routine. We got to do nothing but sit for multiple choice tests for two days, a serious breach of the mandatory monotony that, if you played it right, give you some extra minutes for daydreaming. I loved looking out the window more than anything but baseball then, even with the coalition of teachers, counselors and other miscellaneous adults marshaling forces to suffocate my bad habit.“Fill in the circle with the correct answer,” Mrs. Pruitt instructed. “Clearly,” she added.She walked up and down the rows of desks, passing out corresponding question and answer sheets, dangerous tools that, nowadays, send legions of parents into spasms of outrage as if they were poison arrows and jagged edges. She asked one of the girls to distribute sharpened pencils. Risky shit, but how could be know in the dark ages of 1960?In the Sixties, we took tests that told us where we ranked, and if good enough, we moved up a level. Sometimes, we get held back. I did. The turbid landslide of anti-intellectualism that would discredit education wasn’t on anyone’s radar yet. We needed more TV to get it lumping in a downhill direction. For now, smart was still good.In an adolescent world built on uncanny paradoxes, I was a great test taker, although my report cards, except in the months spent repeating 6A, were a mess of Fs, Ds and the occasional beam of sunlight C. F3s were the worst, the 3 being an assessment of the kind of effort you put into earning your grade. F3s stamped you with not knowing anything and, at the same time, not giving a shit about it. F1, meaning nitwit, was worse, but only one teacher was disgusted enough to slap one of those on me. My internal argument was that I deserved A3s all around. I knew the stuff. I passed the tests, but a high grade without misery and coerced commitment, that is, paying rapt attention in class and spending time at home doing useless homework, isn’t conceivable where careers are based on the idea that, “I know everything, and you’re an empty can I’m assigned to fill up.”Then, the aces out at the University of Iowa cut me loose, even though nobody but me seemed to notice, but not yet.We knocked off our two days of tests. I was thirteen, an eighth grader, when I took the Iowa tests the first time, a loner with lousy hygiene, few friends, barely passing grades and a family irritated by the loser bumbling around their home. I didn’t take the tests seriously, only enough to fill in the right answers, rushing at the end if time was running out, relying heavily on intuition. Fill in the circle with the first answer making its way into your head, that was my successful technique. If you knew it, you knew it. If you didn’t, why fart around? Move on.Finished, we all returned to the routines of public school, guys like me doing as little as we could get away with, bored most of the time, without an alternative, keenly aware of the age, sixteen, when quitting school was legal. My oldest brother had sailed off with the Navy on the first day he was old enough. I could see myself trickling off in that direction, if I could just stand a few more years of public school.When the test scores came back from Iowa and were handed out in homeroom, I looked and blinked twice. Not one section grade was lower than 94. My composite, all skills taken into account, was 99. That meant, we were told, that 99% of all the kids in America scored lower than I did. Looking back, the surprise is that nobody stepped up to congratulate me. I was the only 99 in the school. In retrospect, the shock is that nobody took me aside to try trying to turn my future in another direction, leaving me to be a genius all by myself, brains growing like weeds in an uncut field. But I was used to being ignored whenever possible, so it didn’t strike me as odd at the time.My family? My brothers seemed discouraged by it. Either I didn’t deserve to be a 99 or, more likely, it was a mistake. As far as I knew, Dad never noticed at all. Family set points remained stable.“Well,” as my now ex-friend Roger would say, “fuck ‘em.”Or on the sunny side, as Ira Gershwin wrote, “They can’t take that away from me.” But this was knowledge that changed the character I observed every day from one born to lose at everything but baseball to a rebel unwilling to accept what everyone else said was the truth.Steve Jobs liked to remind everyone that we connect the dots of explanation in reverse. You get clarity from looking back after excitement, confusion, wonder and frustration cut the trail forward — if you chose to cut your own, that is, and not step lightly along the well-worn path everyone around you discards their souls in.Within months of being shown that I was a genius waiting to happen, I started writing my first novel, freehand on the lined sheets Dad paid for at the start of the school, sheets that otherwise languished unused. That was the next dot, a big one, my theme being a boy my age’s romance with a black girl, a topic that sprung out of my head without warning or visible antecedent, like a twenty year cicada. I didn’t even have a black friend yet in nearly all white East Junior, let alone a girlfriend. Fourteen years old, an intuitive radical in the works.

“I don’t know what happens when people die,” Jackson Browne wrote. But I do. It’s like looking behind you and seeing a building has fallen, a part of the city lost. Others stand, but this one is gone. You can’t go back and fix the plumbing. If the skeleton sagged, nothing now can prop it up. It’s gone, one more vacant lot in the city behind you.It’s not the first or, maybe, even the most significant or interesting, but it held its place, it played its role.One day, I glanced back, curious, looking for something else, the look of a building I used to visit and how it sat on the skyline, how it was being kept up, and saw that the building called “Val” was now a pile of rubble, bleached by sun, rinsed over by fifteen years of wind and rain.

With Juvenile Delinquent, the eleventh chapter from my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door, I am guaranteeing that I will finish the book, although you will still have to wait for it. Every chapter should be posted by the end of summer. Then, I'll do a final dust, patch and fix to the manuscript before publishing it as a single volume.

Tip of the hat in appreciation to Roger K. Miller, a writer of exceptional skill with which I share a hometown, Binghamton, New York. Roger's offhand comment about the old days of novels serialized in periodicals got me thinking. I suggest that anyone who admires great writing should click here to check out Roger's Amazon Author Page.

If you're new here or just a horse of a different color, you can start this story from Chapter One by clicking here.
From there, you can follow the links from chapter to chapter.

Juvenile Delinquent

Marion gone, our peculiar stage was set for change. A swing back in the direction of normal made its awkward surge up from the wings.Beverly, younger than any of our previous live-ins with big breasts, fully rounded hips, red hair and blushing cheeks, filled Marion’s place within a week. Another thing setting her apart from Roadster, Marion and Clara was that she showed no evidence of being a refugee from the psychiatric frontier. She was the single mother of a four year old daughter with whom she shared the alleged master bedroom off the kitchen.Of course, we knew next to nothing about where Dad found Beverly or why he let a sixth child to join the crew. Desperate as well as practical, he probably recruited the first reasonable prospect from a newspaper ad, figuring we’d sort the baggage out on the fly. His responsibility for five kids allowed no gaps, no days off, never the luxury of mulling things over.The era of Beverly and her Brat Daughter was short-lived. Four boys, all rowdy and raw, teenagers now, discolored the pleasures of looking after our motherless little sister as well as one of her own. What I remember about the day she left was a conference behind closed doors in the alleged master bedroom. She confronted Dad before he had a chance to take off the tie that hung from his neck all day. Hungry and restless, we waited, trying to hear words, maybe a complete sentence leaking under the door, for the mystery to be solved. Dad finally swung open the door, controlled rage on his face while Beverly packed a suitcase fully opened on the bed behind him. It looked like she’d barely paused to explain. I can’t remember my special contributions, but Beverly cited my oldest brother and me as impossible to handle. I can’t tell you more because my memory eraser was working overtime in those days.Dad’s anger and our punishment were soon compacted and put away as history, but Beverly’s legacy changed our lives, springing us from a kind of vault, at least a little, from our uncommon isolation. Because she had a child of her own, Beverly persuaded Dad to put in a telephone, a tool he hadn’t let unsettle domestic tranquility since Ma Bell forced him to pay up for Mom’s long distance gabbing or strategizing or whatever it was she’d done on her way out. The telephone changed our lives.Without a housekeeper assigned to screening calls, a voice from the past, now dragged down by a southern drawl, found its way back into our lives. “How you doin’, darlin’? I sure missed you,” were the first words Mom said to me when I got my turn on the line, last of course.How can I write this without seeming maudlin? Straight up: this was the first time I felt that anyone loved me, even a little, in five years. I was twelve years old, and intermittent showers ended one hell of a drought.

Dad looked over his shoulder, anger simmering, when he followed Beverly out to the car, her luggage in one hand, her daughter on the other. Later, he’d vent his rage, once again, with his thick, black leather belt, but change was coming anyway. The unintended seeds of revolution leaked out behind our last nanny. With our ages spread from ten to sixteen by now, Dad decided to spare himself another search. We were old enough to fend for ourselves from the time he backed his car out of the garage in the morning to when he coasted down the driveway in the early evening. He seldom left for anything else. Less important housekeeping ended with Beverly, but the essentials we picked up between us. My sister cooked with the assistance of my brothers, all of us taking turns with dirty dishes. Beds were left unmade, and laundry got hauled by Dad to the laundromat across from the Pig Stand on Fairview Street. We shared responsibilities, but there was little balance. Fourth son with a bag of resentment hauled around like an invisible knapsack, I refused to do almost anything unless coerced. By now, anger became so routine, it was invisible.When no adequate emotional fabric causes people living under the same roof to blend and stitch together, individuals emerge roughened by vagaries, irregularities exposed, unprotected, traits exaggerated. Childhood shreds like duck down, the making of a human accelerates. Adolescence is like trying on every possibility, yoking yourself temporarily to the ones that fit, then flipping off to the next. Mostly, you step out. In families left adrift, you take giant steps without guides. You risk.It was a paradoxical time when I discovered both Jesus and disgust. I escaped my father’s rath one Sunday evening by exiting through a second floor window and dropping down off the front porch. The paradox? I hit the ground in time to jump into Mr. Johnson’s station wagon. My sister and the Johnson clan were waiting to be taken to a church meeting. We sought comfort in Jesus’s embrace. And then some.For the short time it lasted, my passion for church, the feelings I had listening to the preacher roar about our savior, cushioned my fall with a place to belong. That’s what church does for most people. Not so many buy the whole narrative, but the gravity of spiritual zeal gets you like a full moon. For me, it had the additional appeal of being the one place where I wasn’t the loser.To be honest, I also had a crush on a girl there. She was memorable only for that since I never sucked up the courage to talk to her. But it was also where I met the Miller brothers, a pair of guys prowling along as close to the edge as I was.So many people went to church then, it wasn't odd to find rebellious outsiders like Roger and Mark slouching in pews. Maybe the gravity had them too, or maybe fate got bored and threw us together to get some action going. “I ain’t going home. My father wants to kill me,” I told Roger, the older brother, as we walked out of Fairview Methodist into the evening chill.“What did you do?”Parents were always right, then, the question natural.“The usual. I got mad at my brothers and yelled at them, but it’s always my fault. When we get in fights, I always get blamed because I’m the youngest.”“Fuck ‘em,” Roger advised.“Yeah, fuck ‘em,” Mark agreed.Thick brown hair curled in a defiant wave falling down his forehead, Roger looked like the prototype bad boy. Mark was more tame, but he smirked a lot, like he knew something that you didn’t.“Why don’t you come and stay with us?” Roger suggested. “ We’ve got a place. Fuck ‘em.”Across from the church’s dirt parking lot, fast emptying, the three of us stood under a light with our thumbs out. Three’s a threatening number. It took a while, but we finally caught a ride out past Kirkwood, almost into Pennsylvania. The Millers lived in a brown shingled house, two stories, on a road losing itself in the tangle of rounded foothills and stream cut valleys.“Mom’s still up,” Mark noticed.Roger said, “You can stay in the trailer.”A house trailer was parked on the edge of their front yard, unlocked and convenient, dream space, furnished like a normal home made up of one long room.“You’ll be okay,” Roger promised. “Nobody uses the place for now, but if anybody asks, you ran away and you broke in because you were cold. Me and Mark, we don’t know who you are. You dig?”“I dig.”With my only alternative being hitching all the way back home and getting the hell beat out of me for my efforts, I accepted their offer, huddling up against the cold under light covers, tired enough to sleep through earthquakes and tornadoes. The earliest slice of morning edged through the nearest small, rectangular window. I pulled back a curtain. Winter swept its long arm back, tossing an inch of fresh snow on the ground overnight. Mark and Roger’s father had parked his semi-trailer rig in the muddy driveway on the other side of their yard. Everything was quiet with snow, but the rig seemed to give off a kind of steam.

It was cold in the trailer. Sleep hid me from it, but now I was shivering. Nothing else to do, I slipped as invisibly as possible out into the snow-silenced morning and walked downhill to the main road between Binghamton and Pennsylvania. It was a school day, after all. I might as well go.I didn’t know what time it was, but the countryside around me had barely awakened. Standing by the roadside as mist backfilled the night, you could see spring, even in the snow. The ground cover incomplete, patches of grass broke the surface. A roadside gutter trickled along unhindered by ice. For a kid as alone as you can be, I felt weirdly happy. Independence juices joy. One ride got me all the way into the city, and as I walked up Broad Street toward Robinson, kids were already hopping down the steps of a yellow school bus outside East Junior. Blue sky had begun to crack through the overcast.I’d have been on one of those buses, half-assed awake, if I hadn’t declared my independence. It found my friend Wally and corralled him into our usual practice of walking around the parameter of the school repeatedly until it was time to migrate inside for homeroom. We weren’t the only ones participating in this ritual. The less restless, the more confident kids gathered instead in tight groups we curled past.Wally was tall and skinny and had a chin straight out of the Wicked Witch of the West. We were each other’s only good friend at school. Wally had, by far, the best baseball card collection I’d ever seen, and knowing I was an addict, he’d let me finger through the player poses and statistics over the summer. Telling him the story of how I’d run away from home and stayed overnight in the Miller brothers’ trailer, I continued with the rest, the ramshackle spree I’d gone on with them the weekend before. It had been one of those days in the mix between winter and spring when a warm south wind encourages with a promise of pushing the gray and cold away. Roger, Mark and I wandered back toward home, walking the tracks of the Erie-Lackawanna right of way paralleling the highway, mostly hidden from Upper Court Street beneath an embankment.We tried to balance on a rail or stride evenly from one tie to the next.“Bet you can’t break that with one shot,” Mark challenged.I’d been telling them what a great pitcher I was in Little League.Enough loose rocks for a million boyhoods firmed up the track bed. I grabbed one and fired it into the tall, round signal. Glass shattered and spilled onto the ground. “See?” I said.“You broke the railroad signals?” Wally asked. “Isn’t that dangerous?”“We wanted to see if we could derail a train.”Roger, Mark and I found spikes laying loose along the way and began strategically laying them across the rails. In my head, a theatrical vision of a big diesel flying off the rails into the muddy flats by the river ran in a loop. Tiring of that and with no train coming to test our experiment, we broke a couple more signals as we walked.Eventually, the tracks curled along a broad field that the Susquehanna flooded every spring.“There was that house down next to the river,” I told Wally, “the one with the high foundation to keep it above the floods…”“Yeah.”“They don’t lock the door.”Not so strange. My family didn’t lock our doors either.The Miller brothers and I climbed up the steps and went inside. “Stupid not to lock the door,” Roger said, then smirked, “so I didn’t have to break down the fucker.”There wasn’t much to see, but the thrill of breaking in vibrated. Roger took coins from a coffee can, filled his pocket and, then, found a bottle of some kind of liquor. “Have some,” he said, handing it to me after taking the first gulp.“Jesus! Tastes like liquified garbage! God. How the fuck do they drink this stuff?” “Did you get drunk…?” Wally wanted to know.“No. I stopped right there. It was the worst tasting stuff I ever swallowed.”By now, we were a few blocks from school and playing hooky by default.Skipping school was a novel idea and, like running away from home, exhilarating.“After a while, we should hitchhike out to my house and get some food. I’m starving. I haven’t had anything.”I wasn’t a fully realized runaway yet.Around the time it dawned on Wally and me that, without school, we didn't have any other way to knock down the day, around ten o’clock, a city cop rounded us up and took us to the main station downtown to sort out who we were.Wally was older and bigger than me, so I told the cops that he forced me to skip school. Wally returned the favor by sharing the story of my railway antics with the Miller brothers.I also told them that I ran away because my father beat me, putting Dad in the miserable position of having to defend himself in front of me and the cops on his lunch break. Lucky for me, he hadn’t heard about the railroad yet.That all came out later in Family Court when I sat between him and his lawyer, the one who colluded with him to strip Mom of her rights, while the Miller boys testified under oath about how I’d led them, Svengali-like, into crime. Their tattooed truck driver father was on hand, too, and took a moment to explain how hard it was, him being on the road so much, to keep his boys from “falling in with characters like that one,” nodding unpleasantly at me.Just what I needed, I thought, two more brothers to pin me into a corner. Roger and Mark were in clean-cut mode, but I understood that. Their father was buying. Mine wasn’t.Dad believed he’d already figured out my motives.“Your mother put you up to it, didn’t she?”The question was rhetorical. I didn’t answer because he was crazy. Red hot nuts were in his eyes.“See,” Val reminded me. “It was your mother, not you, he looked at.”“You know, it changed later, but when she first started calling us, she didn’t have a bad word to say about him. She barely mentioned him, never put me or anyone else up to anything. Fucking nut job.”By the time the Family Court case played out, my only three friends were finished, and I was on probation, a juvenile delinquent on the fast track toward state prison. I’d have skidded right in too, if not presented with objective proof that I was a genius.

Rent-A-Mom is the tenth chapter from my new novel, The Witch Next Door. Inspired by an idea dropped injudiciously on Facebook by my friend, fellow writer and Binghamton, New York, native, Roger K. Miller.

Roger was thinking aloud about how writers like Charles Dickens once published in weekly installments in periodicals. The idea stuck, if for no other reason, because it harnessed me with some discipline and, for the first time ever, relieved me of isolation of treading all the way from cover to cover alone.

If this idea doesn't appeal to you, blame Roger or, better, yet find and buy one of his terrific books, which you can find by clicking here. You can also find my bakers dozen and their ebook siblings, all finished and waiting to help you pass the summer, by clicking here.

We're past the halfway point now, and all the cautions are dropped. I guarantee you that I will finish this book by the end of summer. So, jump aboard and enjoy. If you'd like to start from the beginning and follow the links, chapter to chapter, feel free to start here.

Rent-a-mom

Dad’s adventure with Ma Bell is family legend, a true story we repeated, adding our own memories, until we all understood it the same way. That is, Dad was a stubborn old bird who was not going to let Mom get away with anything, even in absentia, even in reverse, if he had a way to block her.“I don’t know if he cared about the money, but I think he decided to fight paying the bills just because she ran them up,” my brother mused, decades down the road.In the weeks before our funky Florida caravan, Mom ran up long distance telephone bills like a foreign diplomat, ones she could never pay, launching a practice she kept up until plunging rates took the risk out of it.“Who do you think she was calling?”The code of silence meant the details were vaulted, even while the battle went public.“I don’t know, but it was a lot, and Dad wasn’t going to pay for it unless they forced him to.”Dad, who one of my brothers later anointed “the old bull,” a nickname with such visceral resonance it stuck, refused to pay the long distance bills until the telephone company sued in court. His lawyer probably cost more than the charges, but there we were, all five of us like a hayseed royal court, out of school for the one day trial.We know that memory is a capricious partner, sometimes a friend, others an adversary. With a kid who’s been damaged, memory struggles to play its part in the duet between what is and what can be retained. I remember all of two things from that day in court.I remember a beautiful new belt Dad bought me to wear with spruced up clothes. I loved that belt, plastic and rainbow colored. Come to think about it, it might have been a girl’s belt, but it was the prettiest thing I owned. It stood out sweetly in a gray world.The other thing I remember is weird. A juror in the pool, during questioning, admitted that she knew Dad slightly from attending the same Methodist church. Remembering that, among all the losses that year, seems as likely as being struck by lightning and finding out it doesn’t hurt.I turned to Val.“Are you taking me through this for a reason? It’s old stuff. We don’t even make jokes about it anymore.”“Your family made a lot of jokes, didn’t they?”“Two of my brothers were pretty funny. They set a wise ass tone around the house.”“You know that was armor, right?” “Of course,” I said, “too some extent. Humor often comes from pain, but they were also cool observers who found life pretty funny, objectively, sometimes.”“You, too?”“More absurd than funny for me. If I watch closely and really honestly, most people seem lost, feeling around in a dark they can’t admit. The funny part drains out.”“Can I play doctor for a minute?” Val asked with a small laugh.“I’d rather you played nurse.”“No, you wouldn’t. We went over that. What I wanted to say is that, as your psychiatrist…” We both laughed here. “As your amateur psychiatrist, I thought I should point out that, when you do that, look closely I mean, what you’re doing is calling up yourself.”“I am my own darkness, Val?”“Got a good grip on the handles there, have you? Or are you feeling your way along too?”“Not so much anymore, I don’t think.”“Hm.” She looked up. “Well, the jokes, especially when you were kids, were armor. You went through a pretty strange home life, which explains a lot, but that’s not what did the most damage. Your injuries came from the thirty years war your mother and father fought. The kept at each other from a distance. No pitched battles, but your father stuck with his heroic silence and your mother had her ragged anger. Neither one gave up.”“I don’t agree with that, Val. Once the ridiculous hope that she’d come back and we’d be normal again was gone, it was like, who cares? It was between them to let it gnaw away at their new lives.”“That’s where you’re wrong.”This was a little annoying.“Okay, what did we get so wrong, keeping in mind that you never met any of us but me?”“Are you ready?”“Ready.”“Their long battle showed that they had more passion for each other than they had for any of you. Neglect’s as damaging, maybe more, as anything else. How does a mother leave five little kids behind without fighting like crazy? How does a father do whatever he can to prevent their reuniting — including refusing even to have a telephone in the house? Just to beat the other…”“Oh, shit.”“Let’s put it in your words — they fucked their children over, just to sink daggers into each other.”

After Grandma bundled her things together and returned to the farm, a series of mostly live-in housekeepers followed Dad in the back door. Just as he did at the start of every school year, piling us in the car for a shopping trip to Philadelphia Sales, Binghamton’s super savings store out in the First Ward on Clinton Street, Dad scraped the bottom of the barrel for bargain live-in housekeepers. With few coins to spare while providing for five rambunctious, hungry kids, childcare on the cheap was probably his only choice.Teenage sisters living nearby came first, doing lightweight duty. When we tumbled off the school bus, one of them was waiting. In summer, they fixed us peanut butter and jelly or bologna sandwiches for lunch, loaded and unloaded baskets of laundry and swept the bare wood floors where Mom once encouraged us to take running slides to buff up fresh wax. The sisters gave way to a neighborhood eccentric named Roadster. Image the giddy parents putting their heads together to come up with that name. Maybe they hoped she would grow up to become a vehicle. Everything about Roadster was forgettable, except that she once flushed an unsuccessful cake down our toilet while my brothers watched in awe.Within a year, Dad realized full time help was needed. My sister was just five, my oldest brother eleven. A live-in housekeeper had to be recruited. Speculation continues about where he found these women in an era long before you could find almost anything, including much you wish you couldn’t, on Craig’s List. His methods were never revealed, a consistent pattern of needless secrecy imposed. Evidence suggests there was not then a waiting pool of retired soccer moms or polished European nannies from which to cherry pick. He scrambled contacts to find who he could.When Dad drove off alone one Sunday, he didn’t prepare us for the stranger who came to live in our home as a kind of loopy, just the basics pseudo-mom. Our rambunctious rattling around in the place was probably beginning to thrust sharp bumps onto its outer surfaces. Mom, it seems, reveled in the coltish behavior of young boys and did little to discourage it. Into a cramped milieu, a larger than life misfit was inserted.Marion, an enthusiastic, overweight brunette, was lively, loud and pretty much nuts. She lacked the mechanism that comes standard in most human models, gracing us with the power to stop talking and let our minds race on in silence, as appropriate. She never shut up and refused to be limited to topics in which she had anything worthwhile to say. She annoyed and confused us.One of her outlets, when the reservoir feeding her talking threatened to overflow, was attacking the upright piano that sat against the back wall or our so-called living room, next to our tiny bathroom. The only reason we had a piano, as far as I can guess, is that it came with the house and was considered too big to move. None of us ever took a lesson. But Marion seized it like a virtuoso possessed with a satanic demand to play. She seemed unfortunately to never have taken a lesson.A large, exceptionally pale woman, she parked her ample bottom on the bench and began hammering the keys without self-consciousness or inhibition, both of which were unnecessary exclusions because her bellowing of My Wild Irish Rose was plenty loud enough to block all other sounds from interfering. Her singing was nearly a cappella by default.“Where did he get her? She was in and out of the loony bin, right?”We were reminiscing, many years after those singular years.“That’s what we heard,” my brother said. “She was supposed to be a cousin or something of one of the aunts and in and out the psychiatric center. For depression or something like that though, not as an ax murderer.”“Maybe a piano murderer? A music killer?”“Who knows, though? She certainly wasn’t right there on the cusp of normal.”Marion departed abruptly, without details of course, and Dad’s next choice differed from her as if he were trying to neutralize a looming crazy epidemic within our borders. His preference shifted from bombast to a curious remoteness.We never got to know Clara well, which seemed fine with her, but who could tell? Her arrival brought with it some unintended comedy.How far Dad traveled to fetch Clara and her things we never knew, of course. By the time he returned, it was late enough on Sunday, a school night, that we’d switched off the TV and gone to bed. Two of my brothers slept in separated bunkbeds in one room upstairs, my other brother and I on a salvaged army cot across the hall. We all faked sleep when Dad brought our next nanny noisily upstairs on a tour. She had to hit the ground running in the morning.They paused in the darkened threshold of my brothers’ room.“The beds are a little rough,” Dad confided with a rare mix of pride and apology, “but the boys don’t mind.”“Were we asked?” one brother wryly reminisced.The old bunkbeds, hauled over from our old house out on Route 11, the place with the witch next door, really were held together in places with baling wire, decades before the cliche, the multi-purpose precursor of duct tape. My recollection is that some lavishly applied glue also kept certain wooden ornaments from falling off as the next boy ran by.“Mom must’ve let us beat the living shit out of the place.”My brother, the only one blessed with a forgiving nature, shrugged.“She was a child herself, most of that time. What was she, twenty-five with five kids to take care of already?”Our first unsupervised contact with Clara was memorable. My brothers and I, like cows coming home, wandered back from a morning playing baseball in the state fields, our summer ritual, three games every day with meal breaks. Clara waited on the cement block landing outside our back porch, launch pad for kick-the-can on summer nights.“You boys rehyaheet?” Clara called out.One astute brother turned toward the rest of us after a few seconds and translated, “Ready to eat.”“How did you get that?”“My stomach said it must be true.”All that summer, we learned to be rehyaheet at the same time every day.At least for us, Clara was distant and unknowable, strange in her way but without an unlikable quality of any kind. She left her mark not with noise or intrusion but with harmless habits that left their historic mark, unlike anyone else’s.Like all our live-in housekeepers, Clara joined us at the table for dinner. All seven of us ate in the kitchen, refrigerator and stove reachable without getting up. Rowdy as we inevitably were, powering down milk and staples competitively, Clara’s deep silences stood out as pools of concentrated calm, but there was one other thing.Clara stared for minutes at a time at unexceptional objects, the penetration of her gaze suggesting an effort to decode its quantum substructure. Soon, we began watching her like entertainment, which seemed to have no effect. Her gaze broke only after she produced a dry sucking sound at the side of her mouth, sounding like spfit. Twice. Then, we all resumed eating.Living alone in that small house with us must have been hard on our housekeepers, since none stayed for long, so it was a surprise when Marion returned to replace Clara. Marion seemed more settled, this time around. Instead of piano bashing, she demonstrated a skill for making a kind of harmonica by wrapping waxed paper around a comb and blowing on it to make music. She was happier too because she was in love. Her unfortunate choice, however, was Dad. Her second tour of duty, my guess is, she saw as encouragement or at least a second chance.Did Dad stray into her embrace? It seemed beyond the realm of possibility, but most of his life was a mystery to us, the bulk spent outside our observation. The opportunity certainly existed. How we knew, I don’t know, probably from Marion’s uncensored babbling, but there was no doubt that she hoped to rope the old man in.Old man to us, that is. To the outside world, Dad was a catch, a handsome man with a steady job and no wife to interfere. There were the five brats to take into account, though. Doubtless, we darkened his marital prospects.Unsettling was the idea of Marion as stepmom. It resonated more as joke than possibility. We weren’t disappointed when the match came to a head on Marion’s birthday. Dad came home from work to find Marion not leaning over the stove, spoon in hand, fixing dinner for the gang. She’d left the house earlier, something she seldom did. Her not having food ready wasn’t just rare, it was a breach, but as she explained when she finally wobbled home, it was her birthday. She deserved to celebrate.Marion was what we called tipsy then, lightly, but not sloppily intoxicated, a chaotic quality for a person who woke each day with a screw or two lose already. Her condition brought out an interesting quality in Dad. The wilder things got around him, the more unmovable he grew. From upstairs, we heard the confrontation, Marion demanding to know if he was in love with her and planned to marry.His answers crisp and controlled, Dad let her drain herself of all paranoia and delusion, sitting in his favorite chair, the one next to the radiator, undoubtedly smoking a cigarette or two. When Marion lost her enthusiasm for a fight she’d never win, Dad calmly told her she would have to go, her tenure short this time and heartbreaking.I don’t know what became of Marion, but in the Fifties we were less tolerant and more afraid of mental illness. The unstable, erratic or depressed had few places to turn. If there was no room in the family’s home or the demands for care too high, you got handed over to the state. Whole lives were spent behind walls in grinding Dickensian conditions by people who committed the crime of being strange, if not dangerous. Marion was guilty of that misdemeanor.

When Love Breaks is Chapter Nine from "The Witch Next Door," my serialized novel inspired by an idea tossed out there by my friend, fellow Binghamton, New York, native and writer, Roger K. Miller. Roger wondered about the way writers like Charles Dickens once wrote a chapter a week for publications. If you prefer reading straight through, start right here with Chapter Oneand follow the links as you go.

Anyone who dislikes this approach should blame Roger. Better yet, read one of his books, each one finished. You can find the whole collection by clicking here.

You can also find all of my completed books, tucked neatly between covers or downloadable as ebooks, on my Amazon Author Page.

When Love Breaks

If you’re like me, you’re most aware of love when you can’t look away from it.Standing among thousands of people when the Star Spangled Banner fills a stadium, holding back ridiculous tears, my love for this tangled, rough-edged country — or the one I thought it was — swells, as much form as feeling.Death’s the worst way to get caught because denial can’t be fixed. No adjustments are possible when loss reaches deep inside and releases the locks. Cancer finally overwhelmed my father. Our phone rang early one morning, before we were up.“You’re probably not too surprised, but I’m calling to let you know Dad died a half-hour ago,” my brother said.A swell of sorrow came on so strongly I couldn’t get out the words to tell my wife what she already guessed. I cried, stubbornly, for the first time in more years than I could remember.I’d seen Dad a week before, flat on his back in the hospital. His mind clear, he asked me to bring my son around, “if things get serious,” as if a body poisoned from pancreas to brain stem wasn’t quite there yet. He let me off the hook, putting aside what he lost with my arranging so little time. A rancorous relationship with my first wife had worsened, and he didn’t know how many unbuilt bridges I’d have had to tiptoe across, nor could he. Huge and complex once, the fragile spans seemed trivial in the moment.Then, he was gone before I did much of anything about arranging another trip home, this time with his grandson in the passenger seat. As much as I was aware of regret, I was equally aware that much of it was inevitable after my decision to go it alone in the quiet storm of becoming who I was — a big statement, but we live in big times. Out of the wreckage of our family after what is euphemistically called “the divorce,” we cultivated our own separate gardens, living under the same roof, a Balkanized family, each garden surviving but ready to drift free whenever any link in the fence holding us in broke. Links were severed, rearranged and repaired. Wounds were patched over without healing. In the end, we were such different people, so little family.“Who’s your hero?” Todd, my boss to be asked, during my job interview. It was a personal question for him, intended to expose the depths of the person in the chair across from him.Todd was tall and muscular with an athlete’s dominant physical presence, his emotions not far or well-hidden from the surface.“My father,” I answered. Todd was a family romantic but a realist too, and my answer was too easy without evidence.“No kidding?”“My Dad overcame greater obstacles than I’ll ever have to. When he was thirteen, growing up on his family’s farm, polio almost killed him. He could walk still, but with a severe limp for the rest of his life, but he never complained. He never even talked about it,” I added, not sure I really considered stoicism a virtue. “That was hard enough, but he also raised five of us by himself. He was the first and only single father I ever heard off, all of us under ten, but he hung in there. He was much tougher than we realized at the time. Most of that time, he had almost no social life, just us and his job. He never complained. When we were kids, we didn’t really appreciate how difficult that must’ve been, but in perspective now, what he did was amazing.”That was the capsule version, ripe with meaning, so condensed it flirted with being untrue.Todd leaned over his desk, his chair squeaking under his weightlifter body.“How did everyone come out? All right?”“Yeah, really, my brothers and my sister are all pretty remarkable people. They’re all successful, with kids, grandchildren now…”Also, largely untrue. That he never asked how it came to be that my father raised five kids alone left the story seamless.What you find is that love breaks apart like a peculiar kind of crystal. Only enormous effort and incalculable brilliance, plus desire and commitment, can juggle it back to approximate form, but even then, it’s hollow. Because our ill-equipped family lacked much of any of the necessary qualities, our broken love collected oily dust and residue without resistance, sharp edges and rounded corners forever unchanged after the last big battle. We learned not to look back at the destruction, but some light will find its odd way through any crystal. You can see the radiant grades, but you won’t do anything more than nod at them as they slide by on their parallax courses.Love gets bounced around in popular culture, dumbed down until it approaches nauseating. Love’s palmed off as snake oil that cures all ills. In a shallow pipe dream, birthing intensity puffs out in flab, obstructing access, an obesity epidemic driven by fear. Love gets broken and, most of the time, isn’t repaired. Where our inner selves hit the streets, we haul jagged edges and patched over wounds. Whispers of genuine feeling lift us, but it’s like trying to catch bubbles. It gets away. Bubbles break. And we stand by, watching them drift, better to chill than fail.After a year of turmoil on the ragged borderline with chaos, Mom ran through a door and clattered downstairs without saying goodbye, further crippling us, Dad too. Disorder ceased, but in the calm that followed, order didn’t look so hot either.Mom hit the pavement in downtown Binghamton, in the hard area around the courts and other government buildings, struggling to stifle the tears streaming down her cheeks. For a minute, she wasn’t sure she could walk. Bringing us back to New York with nonrefundable train tickets, feeding five active kids for two days on what little cash was left from the Florida disaster, she was now penniless. She’d separated from her boyfriend in Miami, returning to a home where her key no longer turned the lock. Childless for the first time since she was sixteen years old, she hit bottom in a flat and wasted place. She hadn’t seen the wreck coming until she careened into it.“What else was I going to do?” she told me when we sat up late, drinking coffee and swapping stories, decades later, in California. “I still had my checkbook.”Hanging onto the edge of sanity, she pulled up enough charm to pass a bad check for a railway ticket south. She’s rendezvous with Bob in Virginia and figure something out. Their escape to Florida had failed when they were unable to scare up jobs, but you learn and you get better. Nothing shook her off her foundation for long.“Your father and his shyster lawyer really screwed me there,” Mom told me, twenty years after the implosion. “I don’t know what he told you kids, but they never notified me about the custody hearing…”“He told us you didn’t show up.”I remember sinking. After a week on the farm with Grandma, my uncle and his family, we ran up the flat stone path, built to protect your good shoes from snow and mud, to Dad’s car when he turned into the rutted driveway. Temporarily displaced like orphans, we’d waited to find out how the grownups planned to move us back toward normal. “She didn’t show up,” Dad said, window rolled down, without leaving the car. You could see from his pinched smile he felt victorious, not happy.“Do you know what that bastard did?” Mom asked. “I’ll never forgive him for it…”We made eye contact, fleeting because emotions were charging from all directions.“They sent the papers to guess where? My last known legal address, our house, the one I didn’t have a key to anymore. The son of a bitch knew I’d never get it. Of course I didn't show up. I never knew about it.”Orienting around one bad deed, Mom slapped away her own part in setting herself up for it. When she tucked Dad’s children in a car and ran off to Florida with one of his friends, she waived all the rules for a fair fight. It wasn’t extraordinary that Dad countered.Children under ten are damages waiting to be executed. Nobody has to flip the switch. Most parents build thoughtful shelters around it, but our crippled parents seemed, both of them all their lives, oblivious to the harm. It was between them, and who won? “Your sister’s birthday was coming up,” Mom continued. “She was my little angel, but your father and his devoted mother grabbed the presents and everything else I sent you kids before you could get them.”Grandma moved in with us, staying in the big bedroom off the kitchen, when Dad brought us back to a scrubbed up home. Nothing about it would surprise me if she conspired with her most vulnerable son to rub Mom out of their world, jerking down the code of silence.Whatever happened, the oblivion, the voiceless poison, that ensued was unlike anything you could dream up for a story. We just stopped talking about her. In real time, tactics between the grownups meant nothing, less than nothing. Our mother was gone without any drug for the pain or a conversation to build a bridge of sanity. The ticket for Dad’s world carried with it firm rules about silence, the dagger of deepest danger sheathed.Memory’s unconscious tools are underestimated. The history of mental illness says they are also misused. Preventing more injuries, my memory bathed the next few years in forgetfulness. Not everything — I remember some lessons but not the struggles of getting through them.I assume my brothers’ did too. Decades later, raising children of our own, we rarely talked about those days. On the rare occasions when we saw each other, the gaps left wholeness beyond the reach of wishful thinking. My big brothers, scaring me with tales about witches and ghosts, but holding my hands, stronger bodies all around me — losing that was the price paid for protective forgetfulness. A chain reaction of uninterrupted wrecking pounded down the years, easing finally with a buffering of unexpected phone calls. How much did any of us have left by then? We had resilience. We had independence.“Hi, son,” Mom said with an unexpected Southern drawl when I got my turn on the phone. “I bet you didn’t expect to hear from me.”I was twelve or thirteen years old. For at least five years, I hadn’t known if she was dead or alive.